By Patrick McGroarty
Reporter Staff

Halfway through the documentary "Street Soldiers," Mario Rodrigues is driving down the Uphams Corner streets where he grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, recalling for the camera the hours his friends spent hanging around on the tracks of the Fairmount Commuter line&emdash; and the day they found a bag of crack lying next to the rails.

"We sold it, then found a supplier for the stuff," he says. "That's when it started to become a serious business,"

Rodrigues' story drives "Soldiers," a new documentary by John Oluwode Adekoje, a Jamaica Plain-based filmmaker and visual artist. Oluwode and Rodrigues met over two years ago through mutual friends, not long after Rodrigues had abandoned his life in the "game," as he calls it, for a position at the Louis D. Brown Peace Institute. Striking a quick friendship, Adekoje and Rodrigues started working on a way to fuse Adekoje's artistic talent and Rodrigues' hard knocks story into a thoughtful documentary.

The result will have its first public showing at the Strand Theatre on June 30 at 7 p.m. The film follows Rodrigues's path from Cape Verde to Dorchester, from drugs and guns to the Peace Institute. The result, hope Adekoje and Rodrigues, will be an educational tool as much as a piece of art, a cautionary tale to be imparted to students and youths across the city.

Driving through Uphams Corner, Rodrigues explains that as his drug business grew, so did his need for protection. His friends bought guns, and there were many shootings. As time went by, they spent less and less energy selling drugs, and more time worrying about staying alive.

"It just became about banging," says Rodrigues. "This is not a game. Once the bullets start to fly, you've gotta be ready everywhere you go. You've lost your innocence."

The loss of innocence is a turning point in the film, which is divided into six "chapters" based loosely on Rodrigues' life. The first is "Coming to America," during which Rodrigues, now 30, talks of immigrating from Cape Verde in 1980. He speaks glowingly of his male role model, his grandfather, and of how even his influence wasn't enough to stop Cape Verdean culture from being superseded by the fashion of gangs and violence that he learned from his peers in Boston.

As one of Rodrigues' peers describes his childhood, Adekoje draws stark connections between the world of the film's characters- the toughest streets of Dorchester and Roxbury - and violence in the world at large; World War II-era footage of blazing anti aircraft guns and clips of 1950s cartoons that draw laughs from detonating kegs of TNT are spliced in between scenes from the Dorchester streetscape. But the intent is not to suggest that American history or pop culture is entirely to blame for Boston's street violence.

"When you reach a point of crisis, deciding which way to go is a major moment," said Adekoje, alluding to "Crossroads," another of the film's chapters. "In the wrong environment, sometimes both ways are the wrong way."

Adejoke was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, but spent the majority of his youth in London and Nigeria. After earning a master's degree in filmmaking and dramatic writing from Humboldt St. University in California, he moved to Boston and started working.

Adejoke's past films includes a narrative called "Ricky's Palm and Ribs," an absurdist story of a barbeque-owning fortune teller.

"The movie explores the relationship between Africans and African Americans," said Adekoje. "And it's dominated by a sense of loss. All my films have loss."

The emotional climax of "Soldiers" comes in the film's only fictional scene, a late night car ride during which four friends learn that one of their friends has been gunned down by rivals. Seething with emotion, they head for the culprits' home and, off camera, unload a barrage of bullets on their unsuspecting targets.

It's a moment all too real for viewers who live in a neighborhood where shootings have nearly doubled over this period last year, and especially tangible to Rodrigues, who admits that the culture of violence dominated much of his young life.

Rodrigues says those days are behind him, but he still fears that someone from his past might be waiting to exact their revenge on him. He moves forward, working at the Peace Institute and looking for inviting business opportunities for he and his friends.

"Money is the ultimate anti-violence tool," said Rodrigues. "If kids had money, if they knew how to make it the right way instead of the wrong ways, there wouldn't be all these problems."

The film "Street Soldiers" will be shown at 7 p.m. on Friday, June 30 at the Strand Theatre. Tickets, $10 for adults and $5 for youths, are available by calling 617-593-5974.