Gary Dretzka
Noah Forrest
Leonard Klady
David Poland
Douglas Pratt
Ray Pride

In his epochal “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, in 1963, Martin Luther King shared his visions of justice and equality with tens of thousands of Americans, who, like him, considered themselves to be exiles in their own land.

Nearly 40 years later, in a far more casual setting, Nelson Mandela told a reporter from National Geographic that he, too, dreamt of better days to come.

“I dream of an Africa which is in peace with itself,” said the man who spent 27 years in a South African prison for his opposition to apartheid. “I dream of the realization of the unity of Africa, whereby its leaders combine in their efforts to solve the problems of this continent.”

Here, Mandela was specifically addressing the reporter’s concerns about protecting African wildlife and conserving the continent’s vast human and natural resources. Clearly, though, the former South African president considered the millions of people displaced by war and ancient tribal rivalries to be as endangered as any other species.

In sub-Saharan Africa, where genocide has become a fact of daily life, the muted cries for help have largely gone unanswered by anyone outside the United Nations and African Union. Until recently, the world’s superpowers have found other squeaky wheels to grease. The massacre of Rwandan Hutus, by rival Tsutsi tribesmen, might have been relegated to footnote status, if it weren’t for the dedication and persistence of a handful of documentarians and A-list actors.

That torch has since been passed to a similarly passionate group of filmmakers. This time, however, their lenses are trained on the bloated refugee camps of Darfur, in western Sudan. Just as was the case in Rwanda, however, the eyes of world leaders have largely remained shut.

Three powerful documentaries, all addressing the refugee crisis in the region, have recently been released into the arthouse and DVD marketplace: Darfur Now, The Devil Came on Horseback and War/Dance. An adaptation of Roméo Dallaire’s eye-opening, Shake Hands With the Devil, opened recently in Canada, but is awaiting distribution in the U.S.

They will compete for consumer attention with the first wave of theatrical dramas inspired by the war in Iraq. Studio executives, pundits and filmmakers are anxious to learn how audiences will respond to movies about a war-in-progress. Among the questions that necessarily will go unanswered when the final credits roll, of course, is the one raised in Mandela’s dream: will we ever again be able to live in peace with each other?

Hollywood was actively recruited to promote the Allied cause in World War II. With the notable exception of John Wayne’s The Green Berets, however, the studios and the Department of Defense kept each other at arm’s length during the Vietnam. The Pentagon no more wanted a student of Frank Capra to explain Why We Fight than it desired the truth behind the Gulf of Tonkin incident to be debated by Congress.

The documentaries that emerged within a year of our most recent invasion of Afghanistan owed more to Radio Shack than Donald Rumsfeld. The immediacy of their message, facilitated by small digital cameras, has since made it difficult for mainstream filmmakers to replicate what’s already widely available on the Internet and in DVD.

Ever since the end of the colonial era, wars of resistance and domination have shaped Africa’s political and social landscapes. European leaders thought they were doing the natives a favor by dividing up the continent according to natural boundaries and straight lines on a map. What wasn’t taken into consideration, though, was the collective memory of tribal historians who preferred to restore traditional borders.

Ever since, internecine rivalries have been fueled by the easy availability of sophisticated weapons and the profits to be made from resources the colonists couldn’t plunder before their departure. Naturally, the guns and money also helped prop up the bloody regimes of despots of all political, philosophical and religious stripes.

The excesses of Idi Amin Dada, Muammar al-Gaddafi and Jean-Bédel Bokassa, the self-declared emperor of Central African Republic, caught the attention of the media, if only because they were too ghastly too ignore. Eventually, though, the ferocity and random nature of the violence conspired to discourage most newspaper and broadcast interests from putting their reporters in harm’s way. Increasingly tight media budgets helped reduce coverage even further.

Even so, the occasional Out of Africa and Gorillas in the Mist: The Story of Dian Fossey would remind westerns of the African idyll and what might have been if greed and the lust for power hadn’t gotten in the way. Mandela’s courage, too, gave the world a hero who didn’t feel the need to parade around in military fatigues.

In 2001, Black Hawk Down would reopen sores still festering after America’s disastrous, if well-intentioned, misadventure in Somalia. Likewise, memories of the vicious murder of Fossey, presumably at the hands of poachers, would be rekindled every time news of another massacre of mountain gorillas or ivory-heavy elephants was reported. The Constant Gardener argued that the new boss was the same as the old boss.

The “dark continent” of lore no longer existed. In its place stood an inscrutable giant, whose immense shadow was revealed in shades of gray.

When the horrors of the war in Rwanda became common knowledge, the shoulders of a war-weary world seemed to respond with a common shrug. Hadn’t we seen the same thing in The Killing Fields and Schindler’s List? Maybe the multiplexes in Bosnia, Rwanda, Sudan and the Congo were closed the weekend before the poop began hitting the fan, there.

In the wake of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the calamitous tsunami, the AIDS crisis in Africa and countless other natural and man-made disasters, spokesmen for relief agencies openly expressed their concerns over the spread of a syndrome they labeled, “compassion overload.” Regular donors, like the survivors of such events, were beginning to feel overwhelmed by the cries for help, and, worse, helpless to affect change.

Perhaps, the critic for Variety spoke for a great many more movie-goers when he opened his review for Shake Hands With the Devil with, “Another year, another Rwanda movie.” One wonders if he ever considered observing the same thing about the long parade of movies based on the Holocaust.

It’s safe to say that most Americans were first made aware of the slaughter of a million Tsutsis, at the hands of rival Hutus, during the publicity campaign that preceded the release of Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda. It wasn’t the first movie to attempt to make sense of the genocide, and it certainly won’t be the last. A dozen years after the fact, documentaries about those three bloody months are still being produced and distributed.

Hotel Rwanda, which told the true story of one good man’s ability to save the lives of 1,200 innocent people, benefitted from the insistence of its star not to let anyone forget what happened in 1994. Don Cheadle’s crusade didn’t end 10 minutes after he was denied the Academy Award for Best Actor. Not only did he continue to speak out on Rwanda, but he also has demanded that America pay attention to the on-going crisis in Darfur.

Cheadle is one of six individual whose efforts to affect change are lauded by writer-director Ted Braun in Darfur Now. Among the others are a UCLA student who tirelessly worked to get the State of California to divest investments in firms profiting from the Sudanese war; a woman who joined rebel forces after her child was killed by mercenaries on horseback; the Argentine prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, in The Hague; a World Food Program official, who arranges for staples to reach famished refugees; and a community leader in a Darfur refugee camp. George Clooney and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger also make cameos.

“I wanted to make a film that would engage viewers in the lives of fascinating people,” said Braun. “Cinema is strongest when it’s portraying people in action. By shaping the emotional experience, I believed I could educate and motivate people to help rock the world out of its indifference.”

The four-year-long conflict in Darfur is further complicated by having the eyes of the media being focused primarily on the war in Iraq, which, while difficult to cover, has been a picnic compared to gaining access to the refugee camps. Last year, a National Geographic reporter and his crew were seized by pro-government guerrillas and held for more than a month in a Sudanese prison. They were being punished for all the bad press the regime had received.

After two long and taxing civil wars, which pitted the northern Arab government against Christians and Animists in the south, non-Arabs in Darfur felt their needs were being ignored in Khartoum. Following a series of rebel attacks, government forces responded by bombing and strafing villages, and allowing Jangaweed militias to burn homes, kill civilians and drive survivors into threadbare refugee camps.

Other factors working against a quick and reasonable settlement include keeping China happy about its substantial investment in the nation’s oil fields; maintaining a quid pro quo relationship with the U.S., by trading information on Al Qaeda for public support; and a persistent drought in sub-Saharan Africa that’s pushing northern herdsmen into Darfur in search of pasture land. Sudanese leaders dug their heels in even further after the UN’s Security Council finally agreed that the situation in Darfur qualified as genocide, and it ordered the government to hand over militia leaders for trial in The Hague. The arduous campaign is fully documented in both of the films set there.

The release of Darfur Now coincides with the release on DVD of Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg’s complementary, The Devil Came on Horseback. The documentary digs further into the economic and political components of the war, while bringing viewers face to face with the Jangaweed.

It accomplishes this by focusing on the efforts of Brian Steidle, a former U.S. Marine captain who became aware of the genocide while monitoring the ceasefire that ended the civil war. Employed as an unarmed civilian observer, Steidle quickly realized how powerless he was to get anyone within his chain of command to pay attention to the situation. He also butted heads with Sudanese officials who strictly forbid him from taking pictures of burned village and human victims of the militia.

Steidle returned home after the fulfillment of his contract, and made it his mission to convince anyone who would listen of the severity of the situation. Because he came armed with photographic and anecdotal evidence of both government and Jangaweed attacks, it was impossible for the legislators he met to continue to plead ignorance, no matter how hard they tried. Steidle emerges from The Devil Came on Horseback a true American hero.

Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine’s enthralling documentary, War/Dance, also involves refugees, although these villagers are from northern Uganda and are victims of a warlord who makes Amin look like Charles de Gaulle. The Lord’s Resistance Movement is led by Joseph Kony, a self-proclaimed “spirit medium” who is committed to establishing a government based on the 10 Commandments and tribal tradition. Over the course of 20 years, LRA guerrillas have driven thousands of Ugandans from their homes, killed and mutilated countless villagers, and abducted children as young as 5 to serve as fighters and sex slaves.

The children we meet in War/Dance live in the hugely overcrowded Patongo refugee camp in a part of Uganda that hasn’t seen peace in decades. Once they lived with their families in one of the most beautiful and fertile places on Earth, but now they’re fortunate to have a single living parent or a sibling who hasn’t been forced to grow up in “the bush.”

Several of the primary-school students have themselves been abducted and forced to carry a gun. One was given the choice of killing or being killed, and he chose life all three times. Another was required to bury the hacked-up bodies of her parents. Orphaned girls, barely in their teens, have had to divide their time between going to school and performing the duties of both sibling and mother.

These children are the lucky ones, though … infinitely more fortunate than their peers in Darfur. In Patongo, at least, the government is on their side, and, each year, they’re given an opportunity to prove they’re the equal of the kids who live in the south.

In addition to documenting their personal stories, the Fines coincidentally were on hand as the children prepared to compete in the National Music Competition, held annually in Kampala. Patonga was the first school from the war zone to compete in the highly prestigious and popular event, and no one knew what to expect. It would prove to be just as enlightening an experience for the more fortunate kids in the south, as it was for those from Patonga.

“At first, we simply were looking for three kids with interesting stories to tell,” Sean recalled. “We had heard that schools from the north would compete, but couldn’t locate one. People had warned us about going to Patongo, which, they said, was in the most dangerous part of Uganda.

“When we pulled into the camp, they were in the middle of rehearsals.”

The students participated in several distinct categories, including traditional music and dance. They did extremely well, and the experience dissuaded them from any feelings of inferiority.

“Look at me,” one exclaimed. “I’m Acholi, and I’m beautiful. I’m just like them.”

The competition, Fine added, “was followed with the same intensity reserved in the U.S. for the Final Four. The students from the south were from different tribal backgrounds, and they were terrified of meeting the Acholi kids … they might as well have been space aliens.”

The feeling was mutual. As the Patongo delegation’s vehicles pulled closer to the outskirts of Kampala, the excitement and apprehension they were feeling was palpable.

“I want to see what peace looks like,” said one of the students.

It was a sentiment that could have been echoed by any one of the millions of children living in war zones and refugee camps the world over.

November 8, 2007

- Gary Dretzka

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