‘Darfur Now’ attempts to coax apathetic viewers into action

Darfur Now is a slick, almost uncomfortably optimistic documentary about the human catastrophe currently taking place in western Sudan. It shies away from the dramatic “this is what a genocide looks like” documentation that made the earlier The Devil Came on Horseback so chilling, preferring to envision the pastoral idyll that preceded the coming of the Janjaweed.

In the lovely opening shot, a woman scrubs her hair with a bar of soap in a stream. Later, refugees waiting for NGO trucks to deliver their next meal recite the crops they used to raise in their villages. Children chase after one another down dusty, curving paths. The purpose of these scenes isn’t to describe the literal past: Darfur Now doesn’t bother much with history, not even to address the roots of the conflict between rebel groups and the government. It’s just a gentle way to coax apathetic viewers into action. Sign a postcard to your governor, the movie seems to suggest, and you can restore Paradise.

The film follows no fewer than six individuals: Luis Moreno-Ocampo (prosecutor for the International Criminal Court), Ahmed Mohammed Abakar (a refugee who’s become the leader of a massive displacement camp), Adam Sterling (a student activist in California), Hejewa Adam (a Sudanese woman who’s joined a rebel militia), Pablo Recalde (from the World Food Program), and Don Cheadle (emoting alongside his buddy George Clooney). With such a crowd of personalities, there isn’t much opportunity to get to know anyone in depth.

So director Ted Braun soon culls the crowd and settles on the only campaign with any chance of achieving success in a timely fashion: Adam Sterling’s effort to get California to divest its pension plan from Sudan. Sterling supplies the film with a happy climax (complete with a grinning Arnold Schwarzenegger), but it rings a little hollow. Perhaps Braun has figured correctly, and an uplifting ending is necessary to get anybody to do anything—but that calculation is depressing in itself.

DARFUR NOW DIR. TED BRAUN | RATED PG | AT SELECT THEATERS IN LA

Tags: darfur, darfur now, Film, genocide, sudan