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REAL TO REEL: A Documentary Film Series Sponsored by Stuart and Ginger Polisner
DARFUR NOW
Tuesday, December 11 at 7:30
IN PERSON: Guest Speakers from Darfur People’s Association of New York
Members $9 / Public $12
Includes Post-screening Reception / No Refunds
Tickets can also be purchased at the box office during theatre hours or by calling Brown Paper Tickets at 800-838-3006.
The ongoing atrocities in Darfur, Sudan, remain one of the world’s great challenges – not just to our politicians but to each of us individually. Eventually, when the crisis ends, what can we say we did to help resolve it? This is the question that drives Ted Braun’s urgent, necessary, new documentary. Darfur Now follows six people who have taken up the challenge to help stop the murder, rape and displacement the people of Darfur have suffered since 2003. One of those six is a movie star, and it is to this film’s great credit that his work on Darfur is stitched seamlessly together with the others’ efforts. Don Cheadle first became active in humanitarian crises in Africa after starring in Hotel Rwanda. Darfur Now shows him continuing to spend the currency of his celebrity to make the situation in Darfur more widely known and impossible to dismiss. “We’re trying to speak in a loud voice now,” he says, “so that people cannot say ‘I was unaware.’ They can only say ‘I acted’ or ‘I stood by.’” As Cheadle and George Clooney press their case at the United Nations and in oil-hungry China – Sudan’s largest trading partner – young activist Adam Sterling tries to steer a divestment campaign through the Byzantine corridors of the California legislature. Celebrity rears its glossy head there, too, since Sterling’s ultimate goal is to win the support of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. High in the Jebel Marra mountains, one of a surprising number of Darfuri women fighters, Hejewa Adam, trains to battle the Janjaweed militia. Perhaps the most critical task is left to Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor at The Hague’s International Criminal Court, who is charged with bringing those responsible for the most serious crimes to justice. –Cameron Bailey
USA, 2007, 92 min., color
Click HERE for official website.
Filed under: film, international politics
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