Personal journey that led filmmaker to capture the real spirit of Africa

The footballer has a brief shouting match with his mother hundreds of miles away in Rwanda, before hurling his phone into the water.

We have already witnessed these youngsters escape a refugee camp, bribe passport officials and survive being shot at. But for the first time, the audience is truly shocked. Not only can one of these African children actually afford a mobile phone, but they can also afford to chuck it away.

This is a scene near the beginning of Africa United, a new film from director Debs Gardner-Paterson, who grew up in Acomb, York, following the adventures of five children travelling 3,000 miles from Rwanda to attend the opening ceremony of the South Africa World Cup. The film was released last week and is already being widely tipped as the continent's equivalent of the box-office smash Slumdog Millionaire.

I tell her about the mobile phone scene when we meet in a caf earlier this week, a couple of days after its glitzy London premiere and she laughs.

"Someone read the script and said to me you've got it wrong, because this African kid has got a mobile phone, but that is the point.

"Africa has grown very quickly beyond the West's perception of it.

"I wanted to give a bit more of an honest perception of it and open the box of what you are allowed to think of about Africa. What we have so far is so blinkered.

"I remember being a child growing up in Yorkshire thinking, 'I can't imagine what it is like to be a Rwandan child right now'.

"I wanted to make a film where they could recognise them like they would recognise their own friends."

Certainly Debs was given more chance than most as a youngster to get to know the world. Not that she was particularly keen. At the age of 16, her missionary parents moved to Singapore and she and her four sisters were sent to boarding school in India.

"When I found out we were leaving, I was gutted, absolutely gutted", she says, in a surprisingly broad Yorkshire accent despite having never returned to live here.

"I went to Poppleton Road Primary School and then Oaklands Secondary School and all the way through you are thinking about sixth form college in York.

"I was looking forward to the freedom of it, not having to wear a school uniform, getting lifts in friends' cars, everything.

"Then all of a sudden, I was on a plane to a tiny boarding school among the tea plantations in the south of India – I still thought Bombay was a separate country.

"There were 250 children at the school and 26 different nationalities were represented.

"It was basically split between the children of aid workers and missionaries – dirt poor foreigners – and Indian children.

"It was quite utopian in a sense, we were allowed 20 pocket money for half a year, but you couldn't spend it. All the teachers were volunteers and we were taught very differently. I took my English A-levels on the lawn outside."

Debs was awarded a place to study English Literature at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, but took a gap year first where she travelled from Wales to East Africa with her cousin Simon Guillebaud and a group of friends in a converted Bedford army truck which they planned to donate to a missionary organisation in Kenya.

She then continued by bus to Rwanda, where her great-grandparents worked as teachers and missionaries in the early 1900s, and where her grandmother Elizabeth Guillebaud still lived.

It was 1997, three years after the genocide where 800,000 Rwandans, mainly Tutsis, were killed in just 100 days.

"Apart from when I was a baby, it was my first time in Africa and I found it very hard to work out," she says. "I remembered when the genocide happened everyone was talking about it on the news and saying, 'Look at these crazy African savages doing unspeakable things to each other and the white people are trying to fix it'.

"I remember my mum in the kitchen on the phone changing from floods of tears to massive relief, because her friends and their children and husbands had either died or miraculously been saved.

"On one side there was real people going through real situations, but on the other there was the almost inhuman way it was being reported on the television.

"It takes a while to overcome these preconceptions."

In 2000, soon after Debs graduated from Cambridge, she secured a job presenting the Singaporean version of Match of the Day, called Total Football, which she also ended up co-producing.

"I have always been happier behind the camera than in front of it and it was a bit bizarre," she says. "But I love football.

"My parents tried pretty hard for a boy and we always grew up playing it. I used to support Leeds when I was little, they were the only local team around us that was any good. Outside of the UK it really is the big four and nothing else, so I kept talking about Leeds on the show to keep someone else up there."

In 2001, she returned to England to pursue a career in film, working in casting and for the UK Film Council. But at the age of 25, she was involved in a near-fatal car crash which stopped her working for almost three years.

Taking a deep breath, Debs talks through her injuries.

"I had a broken collar bone, ribs, a collapsed lung, broken hips,

knees, ankles, and part of my face had literally fallen off," she says. "Oh," she says cheerfully, lifting up her jumper to reveal a

deeply scarred stomach, "this is where my liver exploded."

She was in intensive care for a week then transferred to a high dependency unit, before spending 10 weeks in traction.

"You would never choose an experience like that, but I would never give it away as well," she says. "I couldn't speak, my voice was paralysed for four months and I was told I would never walk again.

"I looked shocking but people kept coming – it was humbling to the extreme.

"I met my husband Bernie Gardner two weeks before the accident, we hadn't even got together, but he stuck by me and we married a year after."

Like any typical football fan, Debs describes the last seven years following the crash as, "extra-time".

In 2007, she returned to work and directed the 30-minute film called We Are All Rwandans, which is based on the true story of a group of teenagers who refuse to separate into Hutus and Tutsis when gunmen entered their school in 1997. It won several awards.

Last year her co-writer Ayuub Kasasa Mago and Eric Kabera, a Rwandan producer, got in touch with the idea for Africa United.

Debs and a team, including her husband, and script writer Rhidian Brook, drove the trip the children would make in the film then began casting in Uganda, Rwanda and England. Filming took place in Rwanda, Burundi and South Africa this year, with the final scene being shot during the World Cup opening ceremony.

"I was on the pitch at Soccer City 45 minutes before kick off," said Debs, "but we had to leave to get footage around the stadium – it was gutting.

"The film happened so quickly and there are always a million things you would do differently, but the spirit of it is right – if we lost that we would have failed.

"The World Cup was an incredible tournament and was an epic achievement continent-wide.

"That is the spirit we wanted in this film. Why shouldn't these

children go to the World Cup?

"It is too easy when you are growing up to think you can't do things, but partly the crash and partly other experiences have taught me you just don't know.

"I was told I wouldn't walk again and speak again and my face would be paralysed but you don't know what is possible.

"It has been the busiest year of my life, but is just starting to

quieten down and I'm looking at other projects now.

"A good story is a good story it doesn't matter where it is set, but I love it to have something unusual."