Darfur Diaries: Messages from Home

There is a scene at the end of Darfur Diaries featuring the testimony of an old man who is a soldier in the Sudanese Liberation Army, a rebel group which has waged a guerrilla war against the forces of Sudan President Omar al-Bashir since 2003. The old man has a handsome black face that is cracked and creased like the sere soil of western Sudan and framed by a white turban and salt-and-pepper whiskers. He looks into the camera and says, "We had two choices. Fight to survive or grab hands and sit until we are killed. And so we fight to survive."

Aisha Bain, Jen Marlowe, and Adam Shapiro - the three young filmmakers behind this powerful documentary - interviewed dozens of displaced people in western Sudan and in refugee camps in eastern Chad, and every one of them is fighting to survive. They are fighting the desert and a drought which has plagued the region for more than twenty years. They fight poverty and famine and the diseases that accompany malnourishment. They fight to educate their children, despite everything. They fight back memories of the unspeakable horrors they endured at the hands of the Army of Sudan and its Arab militia allies. And sometimes, like the old man with the landscaped face, they take up machine guns and fight for real.

Darfur Diaries is deceptively simple. It is short (only 57 minutes) and comprised entirely of first-hand accounts. But this is what makes the film so riveting. It resists theatrics because the crisis in Darfur, which has left some 450,000 people dead and which the United States has designated a genocide, provides its own grisly spectacle, even among the survivors.

Some children hold up to the camera pictures they have drawn of Sudanese army jeeps spewing bullets and Antonov bombers dropping fire. They have also drawn the wraith-like "janjaweed" (or "devils on horseback"), militiamen who receive money and weapons from Khartoum to steal, murder, torture, and rape. A few of these children go to open air schools that are vulnerable to sandstorms; the schools are short on books, supplies, and teachers, many of whom have been killed. When the children miss a few days of school, their reasons are always valid: "We don't have anything to drink," they say, or "I don't have any shoes" - "I had to work in the market to buy water or buy shoes."

Other children, close to my younger brothers in age, have joined the rebellion. "They killed so many people, killed so many goats," said one young boy, a recent SLA recruit. "That's why I'm here. That's why I'm angry, why I'm here to get training."

The Darfuri women have perhaps an especially heavy burden to bear. Many witnessed the murder of their husbands and children. Some were forced to kill their own babies. Rape has become a strategy of war. (Just this month, a group of Darfuri women risked alienation in their predominantly Muslim society to tell an AP reporter about a brutal gang-rape they endured at the hands of the janjaweed.) Women are often compelled to flee into the desert with their children. "I left my house with tears and four kids," one woman tells us.

I saw this film along with twenty or so other people who had gathered in the sanctuary of a local Church of Christ. When the movie was over we all stuck around and talked about what we had just seen. We asked what we could do as individuals and as a community of believers and as a country. There was a sense of frustration and urgency. It was as if somehow, through Darfur Diaries, we had actually met all these people who had so much to fight against. And the subtext of this documentary, the unspoken injustice which hangs over every scene and followed me out to my car after the film, is that (God help us) they are fighting alone.