cinemattraction

It’s not uncommon to hear critics dismiss the shortcomings of advocacy films, such as Ted Braun’s new documentary Darfur Now, in lieu of their being politically and socially important films that everyone should see. Unfortunately for Braun and those invested in the future of the Darfur region of Sudan, not even such backhanded praise is appropriate for his new film. In fact, Darfur Now’s most noteworthy accomplishment is taking a subject like the genocide in Darfur – to which the most natural human responses are empathy, horror, and anger – and, for an hour and a half, making it almost impossible to care.

The film’s shortcomings are almost immediately apparent. The opening scene is of two Sudanese women bathing in a stream accompanied by a disembodied female voice speaking in the first person and telling about the murder of her infant son. Not until much later does it become clear to which of the two women the voice belongs or, more importantly, whether it belongs to either of them at all. A stylistic choice has dissociated the voice and the events it describes from the person who experienced them. Braun effectively detached the atrocities of Darfur from the character in the film who ultimately turns out to be one of the only characters in the film ever to have experienced them in person.

The second sequence is a series of hyper-stylized still photographs of the aftermath of vicious attacks on the people of Darfur. Such photographs are not unusual to see in a film of this nature, but Darfur Now presents them problematically. Each of the photographs serves as a backdrop for text briefly describing the recent political history of Darfur. The text, however, is not static. At one moment the text appears in the upper-right hand corner of the screen, the next in the bottom right. As one tries to follow the text around the screen, the images themselves are being distorted in the background. Different parts of the image are growing larger at different speeds.

This scene works against the goals of the film in much the same way as the opening scene. The visual effects dissociate the objects of focus from their context. So, the people seen in horrible situations and then unnaturally stretched to command visual attention gain unfortunate visual, emotional, and theoretical distance from the atrocities around them. The text that dances around the screen is impossible to follow, especially while the viewer is simultaneously trying to digest the images behind it; and it disappears far too quickly from the screen, weakening the impact of both the text and the images. Above all, Braun and his editors assume that this brief sequence is the only historical, social, and political context that their audience needs about what is happening in Darfur.

After a brief title card, Braun moves immediately to what ultimately and unfortunately becomes the focus of his film: a white, 20-something man running in a pair of athletic shorts and brand-name shoes down a sunny beach in California. The man is Adam Sterling, a recent college graduate turned Darfur activist. He’s one of six activists whose stories are followed in the film. Four of the six represent the “western world”: Sterling; Don Cheadle, the American actor; Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court; and Pablo Recalde, of the UN World Food Program. Only one of these men spends any significant time in Darfur. Two of the others have never even been, yet their stories get most of the screen time – whether it is devoted to Sterling’s attempts to take California pension-fund money away from companies with a presence in Darfur or following Cheadle on a book tour and watching him interact with his kids in his comfortable California home.

Any screen time devoted to the Darfurians in the film, Ahmed Mohammed Abakar and Hejewa Adam, seems like an afterthought. Abakar is a leader inside of a camp within Darfur for people displaced from their homes, yet his function within the film is never made clear. He is occasionally cut into the film, seemingly just to remind the audience that this film is meant to be about people who live in Africa. Adam’s role is more prominent, as she is shown actively involved in rebel resistance movements fighting to protect the people and villages of Darfur, but her position in the film is not so much as a witness or activist as a representative damsel in distress. In one moment, the camera captures her saying to some of her compatriots that they just have to hold out until the “white people” come – that the “white people” will save them.

Braun seems to have heard this cry for help, but his response is not a call-to-action. It is, instead, a bromidic, self-congratulatory film that points to a handful of things that the “white people” have already done and continue to do. It is a film about activists, not a film about Darfur. It follows people trying to end the genocide in Darfur, but not once does it take the time to define the term, let alone make any significant attempt to represent how genocide has manifested itself in this region of Sudan. A film about Darfur should make an audience angry and compel them to action. After watching Darfur Now, one can only be angry at Braun for having squandered what he described as “unprecedented access” to Darfur on a film about Cheadle and some well-meaning, successful, but ultimately not Darfurian, UCLA grad.

© 2007 Neal Solon. All rights reserved.

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