Long, ubiquitous ethnic-tribal conflicts have devastated the weakest -- the elderly, women, children -- and the results are the distressing subject of the 2004 fiction The Night of Truth/La Nuit de la vérité and, in its U.S. première, the oddly halved documentary, Love During the War. Both films are part of the 14th New York African Film Festival opening at Lincoln Center before continuing at the Bronx Museum of the Arts and then the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Unusual in that neither wallows in fashionable star-vehicle Euroamerican mea culpa mud -- whites are simply absent -- these two movies charge Africans with their own destinies and misfortunes. Brutal wars are internecine, their causes not considered, their carnage and traumas laid on home governments and troops official and irregular, and the psychically disastrous effects seen through nations’ women.

The subtitled Dioula-Mooré-French The Night of Truth won the San Sebastián Best Screenplay prize for Marc Gautron and Fanta Régina Nacro in this, the latter’s feature directorial début. Her 1991 short, Un Certain Matin, was the first Burkinabé, i.e., Burkina Faso, film ever done by a woman, and in this hundred-minute effort she turns to Africa’s oral storytelling tradition, in what at first seems a stark fable but which gathers the emotional complexity of truth.

Protected, and simultaneously hemmed in, by their barely leashed murderous soldiers, Bonandé rebel Colonel Théo (Commandant Moussa Cissé) and national president Kouka Miossoune (Amada Ouedraougo) will meet to end the civil war that has filled their unspecified country with shallow graves, rotting body parts, legless children and inconsolable women. Each angling for face-saving phrasing and protocol, they plan to bury the hatchet during a ceremonial dinner in the rebels’ graffiti-splattered stronghold.

Blood, mutilation, rape and pillage are not, however, easily washed away. Militarily, Théo’s brother, Major N’Gove (Yves Thombiano), and the state army’s Captain Youba (Claude Kaboré) uneasily restrain their itchy-fingered troops, whereas Theó’s devoted loony ex-combatant Tomoto (Rasmané Ouédraogo) stirs up resentments with old wives’ tales.

At heart, perhaps truer than belief cares to admit, are the two leaders’ spouses, Théo’s Soumari (Georgette Paré) ready to walk out with their children Honoré and Mina (Cédric Zida, Raissa Andréa Yoni) because of thoughts that her husband has turned either stupid or cowardly; and elegant First Lady Edna (Naky Sy Savane), crazed by the torture-death of only son Michel, convinced that the spirits cry out an eye for an eye, and frantic to be excused from “eat[ing] with his killers.”

Théo had saved worshipful Fatou (Sami Rama) from sexual abuse when her family was butchered, is visited by nightmares of carnage, and was himself once carried away by bloodlust. It is he who initiates the peace accords, though he cannot escape the savage presence of past deeds. Rough justice is served; a symbolic tree is only that, symbolic, but it is men and women who must bury the past to fertilize the future.

Also female-driven, but more strictly protagonized by women, is Osvalde Lewat-Hallade’s 2005 Cameroonian, subtitled Swahili-Lingala-French Love During the War. Only three minutes over one hour, it is nevertheless strangely split or broken-backed, although Radio OKAPI journalist Aziza begins and ends the story and is its main heroine. Starting from a riverside photograph of her and children Simon, Patricia, Sarah and Daniela, she and quiet-spoken husband Didier recount their not uncommon tribulations during and after the Congo-Kinshasa civil wars that followed the ouster of Mobutu in Zaïre, Democratic Republic of the Congo until 1971.

In 1998, two years after resumption of the on-again-off-again conflict which brought about between three and four million deaths, he had left for a planned two weeks to see his ailing father, hostilities flamed anew, and the couple were separated, he in Kinshasa in the west, she and the children in the east, in a rebellious Bukavu complicated by millions of Hutu refugees and harassed by Rwandan Rasta militiamen.

Apart, most often unable to communicate, they suffered, he a father not able to provide for or see his children grow, she reduced to selling doughnuts and “I saw war, I hated war.” Humorously, she tells of their miraculous reunion after six years, when her family phoned with warnings to make him use condoms. But the two have grown in different directions, and though their bond is strong enough to keep them together and loving, against his wishes she returns to visit the east, her friends and radio coworkers, the women who are just beginning to demand redress and rights, and, most of all, Feza and her baby Judith, who are representative of the film’s second half-hour’s shifted focus.

Fifteen-year-old Feza’s tale of abduction into the forest by troops and sexual slavery becomes the seed, as one atrocity after another is first-person narrated to the camera, those of sixty-three-year-old Marie-Jeanne and octogenarian Mwahondo, of the mother whose seven-year-old was carried off and, from a male doctor at Panzi Church hospital, a child of twenty-one months whose rape destroyed her genitalia and her mind.

A calculated terrorizing weapon of war, a satisfaction of animal lust, or an outgrowth of a way of life where sons say, “Mom, you’re just a woman, I don’t have to listen to you,” the pervasive attacks on women by national and foreign soldiers not only is a prime contributor to the AIDS pandemic but has also created a class of outcast children and women in male-dominated social patterns where, married or not, such victims and their offspring are pariahs. Only one international human rights group has become actively involved, and so the film follows local organizers and counselors like lawyer Viviane attempting what they can, while growing numbers of sisters march in the dusty streets.

Having faded from the foreground, Feza’s “Mama Aziza” flies home -- military men snooze around her on the plane -- to the embrace of her family. She, and we, has learned much. This is not, as a dashiki’d white minister of God reminds his flock, chastisement sent by the Almighty; it is, rather, man’s punishment of his fellows, and only humanity can put an end to such underpublicized “collateral damage” as portrayed in these two striking features.

(The Night of Truth is released by Global Film Initiative; not rated by MPAA. )