November 26th, 2007 - Nikki Serapio  Permalink  View & Add Comments

Reminder: Go see DARFUR NOW this week!

Please take two hours to go see “Darfur Now,” a new film that focuses on six individual responses to the genocide. Even if you’ve seen it already, please do your part to promote awareness and action by seeing it a second time with your friends and family.

This documentary film is not playing everywhere, but you can find out if there’s a showing near you by visiting www.myspace.com/darfurnow. A movie trailer is also available on this page.

Here are some selected reviews of the film:

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Films have chronicled horrific events such as genocide before, but Darfur Now is in its own category: The documentary was made during the crisis, which continues today. By showing the struggles and efforts of about half a dozen people, it puts a human face on the tragedy. We see a prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, a U.N. humanitarian, a student activist, actor Don Cheadle, a leader in a refugee camp and a Darfuri woman who joins rebel forces. The most compelling segments involve locals speaking of witnessed atrocities and how they cope. - Claudia Puig, USA Today

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…But Braun wants his film to embarrass us, here in relatively comfortable America—how can even our tettering, precarious economy compare to mass rapes, ethnic slaughter, the destruction of entire ways of life? Braun introduces us, too, to more than one survivor of the nightmare; this is emphatically not a film about how privileged Westerners are “affected” by a catastrophe to the exclusion of those actually living it. He shows us, in the movie’s most poignant moments, the hopes of the people of Darfur… - MaryAnn Johanson, FlickFilosopher.com

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The best material is the result of the rare opportunity to shoot inside those refugee camps: hearing firsthand testimony from victims about the catastrophic horrors inflicted on their villages is forceful and persuasive. - Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times