Washington, D.C. Film Festival
All About Darfur
- Director: Taghreed Elsanhouri
All About Darfur is Taghreed Elsanhouri's first independent feature length documentary. The film won the chairperson's Prize at the 2005 Zanzibar International Film Festival and was selected for the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival as well as the 2005 Amsterdam Documentary Film Festival.
Taghreed worked in TV production and broadcast news for over 10 years. As staff researcher and producer at the Middle East Broadcasting Center, she completed projects including a series of short films on the traditional children's games of the Gulf States for Disney Channel Dubai and a lifestyle mini documentary series for Aljazeera. The program, titled Moaid fil Mahjar, profiled the lives of successful members of the Arab Diaspora in the West.
Taghreed is currently pursuing her own projects as a writer and film artist. Prompted by the recent London suicide bombings, she is experimenting with the use of installation and video art as a medium for interrogating the concept of martyrdom from within the Muslim community. She is also working on a screen play about the legacy of domestic slavery in Sudan.
Born in Sudan in the northern province of Dongola her family settled in Britain in 1979. Taghreed obtained a BA in Sociology and English from the University of Kent at Canterbury and an MA in Development Studies from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). She is at present working on her Doctorate at SOAS.
- Synopsis
- Up until now, the perilous events in Darfur have been explained by outsiders, or by so called leaders and officials, who often to do not communicate the complexity of the situation. In All About Darfur, Sudanese filmmaker Taghreed Elsanhouri talks with ordinary Sudanese in outdoor tea shops, markets, refugee camps and living rooms about how deeply rooted prejudices could suddenly burst into a wild fire of ethnic violence. The film includes interviews with intellectuals, activists, and genocide survivors and pays particular attention to the opinions and concerns of women.
Elsanhouri returns from Britain to her homeland to discover why the seemingly racially harmonious country of her childhood has become the scene of one of the worst instances of ethnic cleansing in recent history. "I was uniquely qualified to tell the story of race," says Elsanhouri. "Growing up in Sudan as a northerner, I know what it is to belong to a dominant group. As a black woman in Britain living with racism, I also know what it is like to be marginalized as a minority. It is this double consciousness that informs my story."
Elsanhouri and her cameraman journey overland from Khartoum, Sudan's capital, to the Abu Shoak, a refugee camp in Darfur that is home to 100,000 of the 800000 people displaced by this worsening conflict. Along the way, she exposes us to the dialogs that the Sudanese themselves are having about the crisis in Darfur. Some recount tales of witnessing the slaughter of their families while others, who truly believe that Sudan is racially harmonious, deny that ethnic cleansing is taking place. Their contradictory accounts reveal how difficult a task it will be to stop the Darfur genocide.
While documenting the atrocities taking place in Darfur, Elsanhouri investigates how notions of race and ethnicity are constructed in Sudan. In one scene, Elsanhouri visits the elementary school she had previously attended. Just as in the days of her childhood, the students reenact the battles which led to the formation of Sudan, with the lighter skinned children playing Turks and Arabs, and the darker skinned children playing the vanquished Africans. Despite its significance, race, Elsanhouri discovers, may be too crude a concept to understand Sudan's bitter ethnic conflict. Ultimately, Elsanhouri encourages viewers to understand that the ethnic strife in Darfur is a product of scarcity, as Darfurians are dividing along ethnic lines to battle for limited resources.
Cast and crew. »