Darfur Now (2007)
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you gotta be shitting me with this. i got excited at the beginning with the rebel’s personal narration of the loss of her son and her resolve to fight. yes! africans owning their own voices! no faceless, endless african misery in the middle of white/western action - african resistance! wrong. by the end we spend barely any time with the africans but get plenty of hot california legislative action and pats on the backs for our actor friends. the interview with the rebel at the end looked so corny and staged with her gun in her lap talking about ‘guns won’t solve this.’ and a fucking happy ending?!? they flat out ignore their darfuri subjects so they could slap that happy ending and all their upbeat music on the end. way to go guys. this made me appreciate the devil came on horseback a lot more - it avoided a lot of complications but ultimately did not seek to comfort its audience, which made this just nauseating.
the hague lawyer guy had some interesting observations - especially the ‘in 25 years the world will be like darfur.’ at this point, as long as this has gone on, what does it mean for the future? does it push the envelope so it’s even easier to screw poor people in the future? unfortunately the lawyer guy is really in love with himself and just kind of moves on to other stuff to talk himself up. and what was with that blonde woman always around him? with her and then shots of his wedding ring it seemed like he was having an affair and the filmmakers wanted to tell his wife about it or something. it was really distracting in any case.
the 2 they spend the least time with - the leader in the camp and the wfp guy - could have been really interesting but they just didn’t know what to do with them at all. part of it’s got to be trying to follow too much in too short of time, but also an unwillingness to let their story take them anywhere other than ‘this is really bad we gotta fix it!’
