All about Darfur

Credits

Name: All about Darfur

Country: Sudan; Großbritannien

Year of publication: 2005

Format: BetaSP

Color: color

Language : OF m. engl. UT

Duration: 82 Minuten

Direction: Elsanhouri, Taghreed

Screenplay: Elsanhouri, Taghreed

Camera: El-aleem Daffallah, Fattih

Abstract

Taghreed Elsanhouri`s first feature-length documentary, ALL ABOUT DAFUR is an intensely personal investigation into the Darfur crisis, as the Sudanese-born director explains at the opening of the film: "I wondered, Could the country in which I spent an idyllic childhood hold within it a legacy of racial hatred capable of precipitating something as awful as genocide? It would be criminal to be in denial, I had to come here and find out for myself."
Thus began a journey captured on film by Elsanhouri (who has spent the years since her childhood primarily in Britain) through Khartoum, El Falsher, the refugee camps, her elementary school, and Teresa`s Tea Shop, where the director conducted interviews with Sudanese people from all walks of life in order to determine what had happened and was happening in her homeland. Elsanhouri offers through her interviews insight into not only the Darfur crisis, but also the history of Sudan (including the Turkish invasion) and the tribal divisions which have long existed but were recently exacerbated through the provision of arms. ALL ABOUT DAFUR highlights the lasting impact upon the Sudanese people of their deeply felt experience of war, including the women who, because of the social stigma associated with the crime of rape of which they have been victims, are condemned to suffer in silence.
Elsanhouri`s beautiful film helps its viewers to begin to understand what on its face seems incomprehensible. Nowhere is the nature of such conflicts better illuminated than in the following exchange between the director and Teresa, a woman whose parents were both killed by the army during the war in the south when she was still a child.