 "Photo: Photo courtesy of Warner Independent Pictures")
Hejewa Adam, head wrapped in a scarf that casts a soft shadow across her deep-set eyes, is a rebel with a cause.
She joined the Darfurian resistance to government-supported janjaweed raiders, she tells the camera, because the suffering inflicted on her people by Khartoum and its proxy fighters was too much to bear. Behind her, scrawled in black ink on the clay of a low, dingy building, is a heart encircling a simple, declarative sentence: "I will die for Darfur."
The narrative of the documentary "Darfur Now," written and directed by USC assistant
professor of screenwriting Ted Braun, becomes almost incidental in the face of an image like this; any coherent or exhaustive portrait of the conflict would be solely supplementary.
The film centers around six people connected by their involvement in Darfur, as both humanitarian catastrophe and overlooked political issue: Adam; actor Don Cheadle; International Criminal Court lead prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo; World Food Program for West Darfur organizer Pablo Recalde; American activist Adam Sterling; and Ahmed Mohammed Abakar, head of the Hamadea Displaced Persons Camp in the region.
Such a conceit offers Braun and his crew a human face through which to portray the devastation in Darfur, prizing the recognition of our own moral failure to intervene over a more sober view of the genocide's cultural, environmental and historical roots.
But it's a double-edged sword, and the film doesn't come out totally unscathed.
By focusing on mainly Americans and Europeans, it conveys the concrete action that the courageous have taken and implores the viewer to do more.
But the images of Darfur's
natives - the powerful sights of ruined villages, all ash and dust; a convoy of food-filled trucks blasting through the African night, their delivery as important as any military maneuver - lose some of their depth.
The most courageous people of all, the men and women who continue to live, to have faith that life as they knew it will return, sadly remain an enigma. They're just window dressing for the main sextet.
It's this boiling down of the conflict's many sides that any documentary about a topic so vast must undertake and also what makes it, despite its political vitality, aesthetically problematic.
A montage of stills and helicopter shots near the beginning of the film, overlaid with text explaining the background of the genocide, ignores major factors behind the conflict: for instance, the long famine and drought that have plagued Sudan and other war-torn countries in the region, like Ethiopia, Rwanda and Somalia.
The inconvenient truth for a film like "Darfur Now," which is as much a call to action as anything else, is that the ethnic conflicts that tear our planet apart have deep, nearly impenetrable roots.
How to be both accurate and active - to convey Darfurian tragedy and American apathy without scaring viewers into apocalyptic imaginings - is the real task, and the film succeeds only partially.
In the end, though, the film is not a cinematic artifact so much as a poignant display of political activism's mix of sacrifice and success.
The film is populated by people who care so much about the task at hand that Americans' shameful neglect of the issue becomes damning evidence of some moral turpitude in our very fabric.
"One cannot just think that we can continue to see bombed villages and dead people," Recalde says early in the film.
The problem, of course, is that we don't see such images: Our media, like our government, has failed us. In "Darfur Now," for all its flaws, we see the tragedy anew. And that might make all the difference.
