All About Darfur

  • All About Darfur
© CALIFORNIA NEWSREEL
Genre : Drama
Type : Documentary
Original title : Tout sur le Darfour
Principal country concerned : Column : Cinema/tv
Year of production : 2005
Format : Feature
Running time : 82 (in minutes)
http://www.allaboutdarfur.com

Taking the Darfur crisis as its catalyst the film examines the race dynamic in Sudanese society. Through the intimate portraits of a range of characters, from street peddlers to university professors we go on a journey to find out what Sudanese people feel and think about Darfur, about race relations and about not being included in the political process of their own country.

Up until now, the perilous events in Darfur have been explained by outsiders, or by so called leaders and officials, who often to do not communicate the complexity of the situation. In All About Darfur, Sudanese filmmaker Taghreed Elsanhouri talks with ordinary Sudanese in outdoor tea shops, markets, refugee camps and living rooms about how deeply rooted prejudices could suddenly burst into a wild fire of ethnic violence. The film includes interviews with intellectuals, activists, and genocide survivors and pays particular attention to the opinions and concerns of women.
Elsanhouri returns from Britain to her homeland to discover why the seemingly racially harmonious country of her childhood has become the scene of one of the worst instances of ethnic cleansing in recent history. "I was uniquely qualified to tell the story of race," says Elsanhouri. "Growing up in Sudan as a northerner, I know what it is to belong to a dominant group. As a black woman in Britain living with racism, I also know what it is like to be marginalized as a minority. It is this double consciousness that informs my story."
Elsanhouri and her cameraman journey overland from Khartoum, Sudan's capital, to the Abu Shoak, a refugee camp in Darfur that is home to 100,000 of the 800000 people displaced by this worsening conflict. Along the way, she exposes us to the dialogs that the Sudanese themselves are having about the crisis in Darfur. Some recount tales of witnessing the slaughter of their families while others, who truly believe that Sudan is racially harmonious, deny that ethnic cleansing is taking place. Their contradictory accounts reveal how difficult a task it will be to stop the Darfur genocide.
While documenting the atrocities taking place in Darfur, Elsanhouri investigates how notions of race and ethnicity are constructed in Sudan. In one scene, Elsanhouri visits the elementary school she had previously attended. Just as in the days of her childhood, the students reenact the battles which led to the formation of Sudan, with the lighter skinned children playing Turks and Arabs, and the darker skinned children playing the vanquished Africans. Despite its significance, race, Elsanhouri discovers, may be too crude a concept to understand Sudan's bitter ethnic conflict. Ultimately, Elsanhouri encourages viewers to understand that the ethnic strife in Darfur is a product of scarcity, as Darfurians are dividing along ethnic lines to battle for limited resources.

Director's Statement

Whenever I'm asked about why I took the decision in November 2004 to borrow a friend's camera and go to Sudan to make All About Darfur, I would say it was an emotional compulsion to be in the country of my birth at a time of crisis.

In December 2005 when the film screened in Khartoum at the British Council, for the first time to an ethnically mixed Sudanese audience, I realised that emotional compulsion was only part of the answer. I also wanted passionately to create a film that would be in the words, and through the eyes, of ordinary Sudanese and that would speak to them as well as to the rest of the world.

As I experienced watching the film with my first Sudanese audience, I realised that I was a daughter returning to her homeland at a time of crisis not out of an emotional compulsion. Rather, it was out of a conviction that with love and with the benefit of insight and distance that I have as a person who is inside and yet outside Sudanese culture, I can through the film appeal to Sudanese people to find the good will inside themselves to put aside complacency and denial and begin a process of critical self awareness and debate about the paradoxes, racial and economic, in our society that precipitate so much war and suffering.

Furthermore, I was frustrated with the images of silent, suffering people in Darfur depicted by the standard broadcast media in the West. I wanted to make a film that would give voice to the people of Darfur and that would not define them solely by their suffering but also pay homage to their dignity, courage and fortitude.
Taghreed Elsanhouri
Director, All About Darfur

Sudan/UK - 2005

Direction: Taghreed Elsanhouri
Screenplay: Taghreed Elsanhouri
Camera: Fattih El Aleem Dafallah
Editing: Zan Barberton, High Lewis
Sound: Tim Barker
Music: Omar Ihsas
Cast:
Format: Video
Time: 82 min.
Original Version: Arabo, inglese
Production: Taghreed Elsanhouri





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