‘Outraged by Indifference’

Did you see any violence during the months you were there?
No. [But] there were some dangerous situations. There was [one] moment when a group of nomads in a town were angry that we were filming, and they got into quite a fight with our translator, who's not a nomad. One never knows who's what, but they looked an awful lot like what people call janjaweed. Eventually it got resolved, but my translator told me afterward that it had been really close—that they had accused us of being with the rebels. That's the kind of place where someone could just shoot you and walk away and no one would ever know.

Some analysts believe the media have oversimplified a very complex conflict. Did you come away with any sense of the rebels being the good guys and the Khartoum government the bad guys?
I came away deeply touched by the people who had been affected by atrocities. The other thing that I came away with is that while the government of Sudan is frequently portrayed in the media as monolithic, it is not monolithic at all.

One of the most unlikely—and endearing—stars of your movie is Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC). I've already had e-mail from a publicist confessing to a crush on him.
When I read about the work of the prosecutor, he seemed like a natural choice [for the film]. By choosing [him] I was able to explore the justice aspect as well as the humanitarian crisis. I didn't have any introduction to [him] at all, so finally I just made a plain cold call to the ICC. Someone picked up the phone, and they spoke English, and I explained to them why I was calling …

How do you feel about documentaries being used as a tool of political advocacy?
Documentaries have for almost their entire tradition been used as part of activist agendas and agents of social change. While I wanted to help provoke a change in the world's attention to the Darfur situation, my agenda as a filmmaker was to invite my audiences to understand and experience my subjects as human beings first. Once I decided I was outraged by indifference and wanted to make an audience share that and respond to it, my principal purpose was humanist. [And] I think it's important to stress when discussing this film in the context of advocacy: we were completely independent of any organization, of any institution, any governmental body when we made this film.

Do you see "Darfur Now" as part of the packaging that seems to have become necessary to attract global attention to humanitarian causes?
I had seen films about crises in Africa that left me numb and that made me want to turn off the television and walk away. I'd also sat in meetings where the grim statistics and the stark analyses had laid out things in very startling ways, but it left me feeling either impotent or overwhelmed. I know enough about cinema to know that you have options about the way in which you're going to tell a story, so I used the options and tools that were available to me as a documentarian to try and bring home to the world a global problem in a way that would pierce the kind of numbness that I'd experienced myself. It wasn't a calculated strategy concocted by a team of marketers or corporate executives. It was just me trying to come up with a three-page proposal that I thought would interest people enough that they'd want to make a documentary with me.

Do you know what's happened to the two main Sudanese in your movie?
We recently learned that the Hamadea camp had come under attack and that there had been casualties, but I don't have any details about what may have happened to Ahmed Mohammed Abakar.

© 2007