Songs To Enemies And Deserts - A Film About Darfuri Rebels (Fall 2008)

From the mountains of Jebel Marra in central Darfur a ragged group of rebels swept down onto Sudanese military bases in 2003, routing the government’s soldiers and making off with rifles, artillery, and vehicles. The Sudan Liberation Army had scored its first victory, and no one could predict what would follow. Instead of taking on the rebels directly, the Khartoum government sent bombers and horse mounted militias to murder and terrorize Darfuri civilians. The ensuing horrors were documented by the international news media and the world’s outcry was part of the reason that the attacks subsided, at least temporarily. With the government murdering the civilian population to quell the rebellion, the rebels became the civilians’ only protection force.

Who are these men and why did they begin fighting in the first place, and what part do they play in the ongoing situation that is Darfur? Their demands are widely supported by the civilian population: they want roads and schools, clean water, health care, and representation in their country’s despotic government, controlled by an elite that has ruled from the country’s northern region since the Sudanese gained independence from the British in 1956.

Shane Bauer and I wanted to understand these rebels’ world, their motivations, their histories, who they were and why they fought. We felt that in all of the attention that Darfur was getting, the Darfuri people themselves were often portrayed as abject victims, with hands outstretched, needing the west to come to their rescue. And yet here were Darfuris who had risen up against a murderous and racist regime, people who were very far from being helpless Africans.

The film will try and put the Darfur crisis in a broader context of of the longer and deeper history of the Sudan and of Africa, focussing the ordinary people who, frustrated by decades of marginalization by their country's rulers and inspired by the limited successes of the war in South Sudan, rose against Khartoum and have since suffered the terrible consequences.

In August 2007 we went and found them in North Darfur, lived with them for five weeks, and shot a movie about them. Our trip was funded in part by a grant from the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, and a short version appeared on the Spring 2008 issue of Wholphin, a DVD magazine based here in San Francisco.

We are currently in post-production, check this site for updates.

 

500 Miles To Babylon (2008, 60 minutes, video) Filmed over the course of three trips to Iraq as an independent videographer, this is a documentary not about soldiers, not about governments, but about Iraqi civilians and a handful of independent journalists in a country being turned into hell. A cinema verite narrative of daily life, disintegration, and the humor that ordinary people adapt when living in a warzone.

Narrated by the filmmaker, it addresses the current war not simply as a conflict over petroleum profits or a scheme to fill a company's coffers, but as part of a larger American imperial project. Through impromptu interviews, glimpses of daily life, still photographs, and footage of car-bombs, demonstrations, night-time graffiti artists, Sufi rituals, and the celebrations following Saddam's capture, 500 Miles To Babylon charts the early days of the U.S. occupation as it blundered its way and Iraqi society began to collapse.

The story includes rare footage from inside besieged Fallujah, where the filmmaker went in April 2004 with a group of volunteers to deliver medical aid to the town's inhabitants and subsequently reported to the world about the conditions of civilians during the fighting. With a soundtrack of Iraqi Choubi songs compiled by Sublime Frequencies.

500 Miles To Babylon is currently screening at festivals and other venues. If you are interested in hosting it please contact the filmmaker.