CineVegas - A Dark Day One

The Biggest Superhero of the Summer.

With CineVegas in full swing Adam and I will be taking a break for a couple days in order to catch up on that arduous and oh-so important aspect of covering film festivals – the actual "writing about it" part. Meanwhile our hot new recruit noted cinema scholar Jeff will take over the Watch while we write, rest and rehabilitate. Then in keeping with this experimental new process we've tentatively dubbed "Taking Turns," Adam and I will return to our posts, whereupon Jeff may then dazzle you his keen insight and gleaming sharp wit, while Adam and I resume our work. With any luck we may even be graced with an entry from the savant-like mind of Tyler Sanders.

Before I begin, a quick shout out to our beloved Las Vegas colleagues the dynamic duo of Judy and Stephen Thorburn founders of http://theflickchicks.com/ as well as the Sweet Charlotte of the World Wide Web, Victoria Alexander. We also welcomed a new friend to the fold, the lovely Sara Thomas. As always we would be remiss without a sincere thank you to the Trevor Groth and the refreshingly courteous and accommodating staff for making CineVegas the most pleasant and anticipated festival experience of the year. May it grow and prosper, but hang onto it's charm. After being treated like a trenchcoat-wearing flasher with leprosy at Showest, it's nice to take part in an event where they understand that press is good – that publicity can be helpful where promoting films is concerned.

After getting settled in, and our credentials in order the first film we were to screen was by no means entertaining. Moving, compelling, saddening and sobering, The Devil Came On Horseback was not a whole lot of fun to watch. Yet as uncomfortable as it may be to sit through, one certainly hopes that enough people will see the film in hopes that heightened awareness may help to hasten and mobilize either a U.N. or U.S. lead response to the wholesale slaughter that has been sanctioned, financed and directed by the Sudanese government upon the people who inhabit the Darfur region of Sudan.

The documentary chronicles the bizarre and harrowing experiences of Marine Captain Brian Steidle from the day he answered an ad to work for the African Union in a non-military capacity in the wake of a precarious ceasefire among warring factions in Sudan. He signed on as a neutral observer ostensibly to keep tabs on the situation on the ground and report any violations of the ceasefire. As documentarians Annie Sundberg and Rick Stern film begins Brian is quite unaware that the camera he has come armed with will be taking pictures of life in hell.

It doesn't take long for Brian to realize that his camera can best be put to use in Darfur and once he relocates his small team of observers closer to Darfur he will spend the next several months witnessing and photographing the unimaginable horrors of what amounts to systematic genocide. The title of the documentary comes from the Sudanese trained and armed militia that calls it's self "Janjaweed" which translated roughly means "devil on a horse"

With the governments stamp of approval the Janjaweed quite simply assault villages in Darfur, killing indiscriminately, chain women and children together and burn them to death, shoot anyone they feel like and for their trouble they are free to rape and pillage before burning the villages down one hut at a time. To date some 400,000 have been murdered and 2.5 million have been driven from their homes. Those who manage to escape with their lives flee to nearby villages and most have made their way across the border into Chad, where they are safer but left with little to do but bemoan their lost loved ones and try to scratch out any kind of subsistence amid the starkest of squalor.

Ten years down the road from the comparable madness that beset Rwanda, little seems to have been learned from that example, as Brian's efforts (and his stacks of sickening photographs) have by and large been ignored by our political leaders. He'll get a pat on the back for his fine work, but so far its been all lip service, and it is generally thought that the film itself is in large part guaranteeing that Brian won't turn up missing. Silenced. The film demonstrates the disheartening lack of action on the part of everyone from Condaleeza Rice to the UN. The problem lies in the ticklish situation with the Chinese government who rely heavily on the oil produced on the border of Darfur and the pipeline that runs along its eastern border.

The Devil Came On Horseback is an appeal to everyone to become involved to put pressure on your elected officials and to hopefully make it an issue in the upcoming Presidential race. The Bush administration doesn't want to leave behind a legacy of economic turbulence which may or may not result from threatening the Chinese. Sadly the U.S. Economy has become so dependent on healthy trade relations with China that any action that might be perceived as hostile toward China could trigger serious economic consequences. Thus getting these beleaguered people military assistance, sadly is a complicated issue. But seeing this film and getting the chance to talk with Steidle personally has inspired me to try to do something. I would certainly urge you to familiarize yourself with this ongoing tragedy.

For a list of things that you can do to help put an end to Sudan's program of murder and ethnic elimination go to http://www.thedevilcameonhorseback.com/home.html and make an effort to see this very brave and important film. In a summer full of films about superheroes, Brian Steidle is the real thing. It was an awesome feeling to shake his hand.

A

Later on that night Adam and I took in a Midnight screening of Hostel 2, which I'll let him review. Ironically, the sadistic violence depicted in that film paled in comparison with the things going on every day in Africa.