tagged w/ christmas in darfur
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For all the charity and humanitarian aid that's been poured into the Darfur region, and all of the celebrities pleading for change -- it seems nothing has changed. People are still dying, atrocities continue, and the war worsens. This sense of futility is what makes the project we're sharing with you today so interesting.
The ultra-low-budget documentary "Christmas in Darfur?" follows the challenges two amateur filmmakers (and their limited crew) face as they attempt to make a film about what it was like for aid workers to spend their holiday season in this war-torn African desert. Boing Boing Video guest correspondent Sean Bonner interviewed the film's director Jason Mojica about that experience, and we bring you that conversation today, along with clips from the finished film.
Driven by the desire to understand the gap between all the global attention to Darfur and the worsening conditions there -- and with no experience in filmmaking, or any connections in Africa -- the filmmakers' guileless approach takes them deep into the refugee camps of Chad.For all the charity and humanitarian aid that's been poured into the Darfur... more
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It’s been a few years now since we decided that it was a Good Idea to check out some camps for Darfur refugees to try to figure out what exactly was going on in that particular slow-motion apocalypse, so we begged for money, shopped for body armor, got an impressive array of immunizations, bought a bad-ass first aid kit, hit up anyone we could for advice and headed out to Darfur (or at least right next to Darfur) to make a movie and figure this whole thing out.
So, now that we’re back and we’ve finished our movie, it’s time to ask what the rest of the world has accomplished in Darfur in the meantime. As far as we can tell, it looks like just about everyone has decided to be Very Deeply Concerned about Darfur. In a surprisingly effective global effort, the international community has produced copious amounts of concern, circumspection and caring. So much, in fact, that roughly 14.8 metric tons of concern per day is being produced for each refugee camp, along with more than 140 liters of circumspection and 6.7 bushels of caring per annum for each and every refugee, war widow, internally displaced person, and so on.
Just kidding!!! The international community has produced nowhere near that amount of caring or concern and, in any case, even if the world were that concerned, it still wouldn’t matter a single bit.
Even with the avalanche of press attention, celebrity public-service announcements, diplomatic notes, Congressional junkets, international condemnation, well-intentioned and occasionally baffling protests, heady conferences, solemn books and magazine articles, and a bewildering array of conflict resolution efforts, negotiations, and peace talks, it doesn’t look like much of anything has actually been done to actually stop a murderous tinpot dictator with an inexplicable desire to acquire some exceedingly desolate real estate using a impressive collection of remarkably brutal genocidal tactics.
(Click the link to read the rest of G. Ryan Faith's piece)It’s been a few years now since we decided that it was a Good Idea to check out... more
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