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PANEL ON SOCIAL ISSUE DOCS AND
"DARFUR NOW"
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Bonnie Abaunza/Moderator:
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Hi, I’m Bonnie Abaunza VP, Campaign Development and Operations at Participant Productions. This panel focuses on the role the entertainment community can play in creating documentaries which tackle social justice. Two of the panelists joining us today are filmmakers involved in the documentary “DARFUR NOW” and two are partners on the Social Action Campaign associated with the film. They will discuss DARFUR NOW and it’s goal in educating the public about the humanitarian crisis in Darfur and mobilizing them to take the kind of action that will save lives and end the atrocities that continue to ravage the region.
The conflict in Darfur Sudan which began in 2003 has led to some of the worst human rights abuses imaginable, including systematic and widespread murder, rape, abduction, and displacement. Hundreds of thousands of civilians have been killed in both deliberate and indiscriminate attacks and over 2.5 million have been displaced. The spread of the campaign into Chad has also uprooted over 170,000 Chadians who remain vulnerable to attacks by armed groups.
“DARFUR NOW” focuses on six individuals who are committed to ending a crisis that many have called a genocide. The film is being released theatrically by Warner Independent. I will now introduce our panelists : CATHY SCHULMAN is President of Mandalay Pictures and the Academy Award winning Producer of the film, “Crash.” She is Producer along with Don Cheadle and Mark Harris of “DARFUR NOW.”
TED BRAUN is the Writer-Director of “DARFUR NOW.” He has written and directed several award winning documentaries and short fictional films and is currently Assistant Professor of Screenwriting at USC.
COLIN THOMAS-JENSEN is Policy Advisor to the non-governmental organization, Enough, the Project to Abolish Genocide and Mass Atrocities. He oversees the organization’s fieldwork in Sudan, Congo, and Uganda.
JANICE KAMENIR-REZNIK is Cofounder and President of Jewish World Watch, which was established in 2004 to mobilize communities to prevent genocide and other global human rights atrocities. Through Jewish World Watch more than one million dollars has been committed to direct aid to refugees in Darfur, Chad and the Central African Republic.
I would like to begin with Colin Thomas-Jensen. Colin if you could just please give us a brief overview of the crisis in Darfur and update us as the most recent events from this past week.
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Mr. Thomas-Jensen:
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What’s happening in Darfur has evolved over the past four years. In 2003, the government of Sudan began a campaign against rebels in western Sudan in the area called Darfur. They had a choice to fight a conventional war or to do what they’ve done in a number of conflicts in the 18 years in which they’ve been in power – to fund ethnically-based, private militias to target civilian populations. In the case of Darfur, the strategy that they had perfected they used again with great effect. Direct attacks against civilians for their unsubstantiated “support of the rebels’ but actually aimed at killing, raping, looting and then displacing populations off of valuable land have resulted in one of the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
And the situation has changed over time. At the beginning there was an obvious policy you could see by the government of Sudan to kill and displace and loot. What has happened as the situation evolved has made the conflict appear much more complex, when at it’s core, the situation is still a direct result of deliberate policies being made in Khartoum. What are those complications? One - so many people have been displaced and so much land has been stolen that now we’re seeing some of the various communal factions, communal groups, often called “tribes,” (I like to avoid that word) fighting it out for the remainder of the resources. It’s being described as a situation of anarchy. However, I would submit this is exactly what the government of Sudan has been able to do in multiple wars in the past. Civil wars dividing local communities against one another, arming one side, stoking local conflict and then stepping back and saying, “oh my gosh it’s anarchy,” when in fact it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s something that the government of Sudan is trying to do again.
Secondly the regionalization of the conflict makes it look more complex. The conflict in Darfur has now spread into Chad with the same types of attack being committed against civilians in Chad. The government of Sudan is supporting Chadian rebel groups inside Chad to attack civilians. It’s supporting other militias that are going across the border into Chad, as well as the Central African Republic which is probably one of the most, least visited countries in the world, but is home to some of the worst humanitarian conditions on the planet. This strategy by the government of Sudan to regionalize the conflict again makes it more complex both to understand from an analytic perspective but also in order to shape a response, since responding to a crisis that’s contained in one country is “easier” in a way. As difficult as responding to Darfur has been, it’s been much easier than responding to what we have now, which is a regional crisis. Now multiple peacekeeping forces are talking about having to deploy in multiple areas of operations for humanitarian organizations.
The third strategy that I think is being used by the government of Sudan to disguise this overall policy of ethnic cleansing is a total destruction of civilian livelihoods and this is something that has often been lost in the analysis. Genocide is not simply about killing people and eliminating a group by killing people one-by-one. It’s also about destroying a way of life. And in effect, the government of Sudan continues through its policy of forced displacement and forced relocation and inviting other communities on to land that has been vacated, to successfully destroy a way of life that’s existed for hundreds of years.
We are looking to respond to this crisis by reversing ethnic cleansing, allowing the people that have been displaced to actually return to their homes and do so voluntarily with some measure of safety- that is the sort of gold standard of what we’re looking to do.
So, to sum it up -what I think started as a very clear case of a government targeting certain of it’s civilians is being masked by a number of strategies that the government of Sudan is in fact employing. They’ve managed to add layers of complexity to the conflict to accomplish their goal which is ultimately grinding the people of Darfur under their heel.
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Bonnie Abaunza/Moderator:
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Thank you. What I’d like to ask Cathy and Ted - did you two know about this when it started in 2003..or when did you find out about it? What was the genesis for wanting to produce and direct a documentary about this crisis?
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Cathy Schulman:
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For me I was not aware of the situation as it began. But while I was working with my partner, Don Cheadle, my partner on this and also my partner on “Crash,” on the academy campaign for “Crash,” I became radicalized by Don and educated by Don, who had been involved with the crisis from the outset. Don and I thought, when we had our moment of fame after winning the Academy Award, if there was ever a time to do something that makes a difference, now is the time to do it. I think some of you were here last year at the Summit - I’m having a flashback - because we were talking then about how I wanted to do this and here we are a year later. It’s so very exciting that it’s actually happened. But back to last year - Don and I knew we wanted to do something.
But we went our separate ways working on our businesses and then I heard a narrative pitch for a regular, narrative film about a soldier in Darfur. And I thought, oh my God. Truth is stranger than fiction. We can’t do a narrative film about a crisis that’s happening as we’re sitting here. And it occurred to me, we should do a documentary and we should try to do the most accessible documentary we possible can. The question then became how do you talk about a subject like this without doing a dreary movie that is only going to make people turn away from it as opposed to towards it. I guess I looked at myself and thought why is it so easy for me to sit here and say I’m not going to do anything about what’s happening in Darfur just because it’s so far away and it’s so complicated and what could I do anyway? And I thought - what if we ask that question as the premise of the film? What if we found people, who had somehow figured out how to radicalize themselves and become active within the context of their own abilities to actually make a difference in the world? That became the notion for, the seeking for a kind of film to do. And it was shortly thereafter that I found Ted.
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Ted Braun:
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I believe I was the next meeting you had.
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Cathy Schulman:
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You were.
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| Ted Braun: |
All of that thinking happened in the five minutes between appointments?
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Cathy Schulman:
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Yeah!
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Ted Braun:
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My awareness of the Darfur crisis began after Cathy’s. I was dimly aware of what was going on in Darfur for a while, but really turned my attention to it about 18 months ago when a friend of mine called, actually my agent, as strange as that might sound. . He had come from a meeting of the American Jewish Committee’s Darfur Task Force. And he was feeling helpless and powerless and thinking: what can I do to solve a crisis halfway around the world? I’m not an expert in foreign affairs, what can an agent do? And the light bulb went off as he was driving home and he said, maybe I can interest a client in making a documentary. He called me when he got home and I said let me look into it. And two weeks later, I called him back and said, I do think there’s a documentary film to be made here and I outlined how I’d approach it.
During the time that I was investigating the situation, with an eye towards making a film, I had two reactions. One I was shocked by the atrocities that were unfolding there. Two, I was almost equally shocked by the world’s indifference, by its willingness to allow these things to go by unchecked. I thought that if I could do anything I might be able to make a film, but it would be of little value if people didn’t come to see it, if it was a film simply for those already aware of the situation or already convinced of the value of activism and doing something about the crisis. So, I asked myself as a storyteller, using the skills I had as a screenwriter and as a director, what would be the best way to bring a wide audience into a nightmarish situation? And I realized the answer was to put the audience in the shoes of people that had hope, people that believed they could bring an end to this crisis. And because it’s a documentary, I had no idea whether they would succeed or fail and the odds were that they wouldn’t succeed because the crisis has been going on unchecked for the better part of you know three years by the time I began work.
But I knew from pictures like “Cuckoo’s Nest” that you know you can take an audience into a house of horrors, like a mental asylum in which human beings’ spirits are crushed, people are lobotomized, destroyed. A wide audience will still go in to a place like that if they ride on the hopes and dreams of someone who believes they can do something, someone who believes that they can transform the environment. And in the case of “Cuckoo’s Nest,” you have this crazy guy, McMurphy, who loves freedom. I mean he’s actually a pretty rotten guy in the demographic description of him, you know - been in prison, statutory rape, all these awful things. But his dream is of freedom. But I realized from a very short study of the Darfur situation that there was no way you could find a single individual that would either have a hope of resolving the conflict realistically or that a single individual could encompass all the complexities of the situation.
So, I knew that if I could find a group of people, different aspects of the problem, tackling different sides of what the Darfur issue was, all of whom shared a belief that they could make a difference in this conflict, that we had a shot appealing to a wide audience. So, I developed a proposal and in a very short period of time, I think within four to six weeks of having first looked into the situation, I was sitting in a room with Cathy who, thank heavens responded to this very quickly. And that’s how we got started.
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Bonnie Abaunza/Moderator:
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Thanks. I want to get into the nitty-gritty of how you then selected these six and to know how you got this financed. But I want to bring Janice into this discussion because Ted said something very important. He said he had to look for people who believed they could bring an end to the crisis, so I want to ask Janice about the genesis of the Jewish World Watch and your response to what was happening in Darfur.
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Ms. Kamenir-Reznik:
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Thank you Bonnie. Good morning everybody. I helped to start an organization that was actually suggested by Rabbi Harold Schulweis, a Rabbi in Encino, when he asked the congregation one Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, three years ago, he said what are we doing about Darfur? And believe it or not, there was this major humming around the congregation. A couple thousand people saying, “What’s Darfur? What’s he talking about?” He said we sat through a Rwanda and he’s ashamed of that and he’s not prepared to allow his congregation to go through another genocide and pretend like it’s not happening or pretend like we can’t do anything about it.
With that, following that service that day we formed this organization that now, three years later has mobilized 60 congregations, Jewish congregations, who are the members of Jewish World Watch. And we’ve reached out far beyond the Jewish community and far beyond a synagogue affiliation to mobilize lots of different organizations. We’ve worked with schools and churches. Our mission is to educate people about the genocide. To activate people politically to help build political will that will stand up and say this is intolerable, we’re not going to allow this to happen, anywhere in the world without us screaming and yelling. And the third thing we do is very direct refugee relief in the form of medical clinics, clothing, educational supplies and our Solar Cooker Project that addresses the issue of violence against women, which this organization (WIF) will be particularly interested in.
We have a women’s committee that was absolutely mortified to learn that when girls and women leave the camp to get the firewood that they need to cook the food, they were almost systematically or almost uniformly raped and branded. This was so shocking and so disturbing that despite the fact that all the organizations in the world said forget solar cooking, we tried to introduce it and it doesn’t work, we decided to go forward with it because maybe it could work if we introduce it as an economic development project. And that’s what our project has been. It’s been an economic development project. We employ women in the camps to manufacture the solar cookers and to teach each other how to use them. We do recipe development because the food tastes different and that was an impediment. And in the one camp that we have completed we have been able to reduce by somewhere around 40% to 50%, the number of trips taken out of the security of the camp by the women.
I really believe like the people that Ted filmed for the movie, you’re not going to solve a problem, but just to not start solving it because you can’t solve it, is not acceptable. To do what you can do, and that’s what Jewish World Watch is about. So, we continue to mobilize, I’m actually going to our refugee camp next week. I’ll be in the camp where we introduced our Solar Cooker Project. Our objective is to try to leverage what we’ve done and try to convince the United Nations and other large organizations who prefer to try to import wood into sub-Sahara in Africa …. . instead of looking for a viable alternative, which is more ecologically friendly, healthier, safer for the women that are doing the cooking and sustainable if you can introduce it in a sensitive, educational and proactive way.
Solar cooking doesn’t work, nothing works, if you go dump a ”solution” into some refugee camp. That’s what the organizations would say to us. They’d say we brought them 400 cookers and then three months later we came back and the cookers were all still sitting there. Well, that is not a very culturally sensitive way to try to introduce a totally new technology. So, we’re trying to do this in a different sort of way that actually costs a lot less than bringing firewood into the camps and is better for the environment. In the sub-Sahara in Africa right now there’s a major crisis with water. There’s desertification, and there are no trees left. In a couple of years, even the people who don’t care about women and women being raped, and don’t care about other issues, are going to have to deal with there not being enough wood in that part of the world to be able to accommodate all the people, all the needs. So, we believe that this is a very viable solution that we’re working on.
We are an activist organization. We raise money. We raise consciousness. We work with Genocide Intervention Network. We work with Enough. We work on issues like divestment. And we really are very supportive of people like Ted and Participant, and all of you who work on these kinds of documentaries. There was this line in “Hotel Rwanda” that is always in the back of my head, speaking of Don Cheadle. How many of you have seen “Hotel Rwanda?” So, you all may remember it with piercing sincerity. The line when Paul Rusesabagina, who was played by Don Cheadle, was so excited to get word out about what’s happening in Rwanda and he said to Nick Nolte who played the UN Rep, saying, “Oh, well now we’re going to get the word out and now everybody will know and then our, and then you know it’ll stop. The horror will stop.” And I believe it was Nick Nolte who answered back saying, “No, what’s going to happen is people will be eating their dinner or they’ll hear a little news flash about terrible things happening in Rwanda. They’ll say oh, isn’t that too bad. And then they’re going to go back to eating their dinner.” And our point is to penetrate beyond that, to be able to not be able to go back to eating your dinner. Yes, eat your dinner. But eat your dinner while you’re activating, while you’re doing something. And we try to make it as easy as possible for people to make a difference.
The more films there are, the better. I watched this film and I became very connected with the stories of six different people. If you don’t relate to one you’ll relate to another. The passion of the people in the film is enough to ignite individuals to realize the difference that they can make incrementally. One guy who brings the food to one refugee camp isn’t going to save everybody in Darfur. But you will save the people in that refugee camp, that day they’re going to have another meal to eat because you were there giving them their meal. Learning about that should help you and the rest of our world realize that you don’t have to do everything, but you do have to do something. So, that’s what we’re here to do.
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Bonnie Abaunza/Moderator:
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Thank you Janice. The Solar Cooker Project is one of the initiatives in Participant’s Social Action Campaign that is supporting the film. And I would encourage all of you to be as supportive as you can of Jewish World Watch. It really is an amazing project in helping to save lives. So thank you, Janice.
Now I’d like to bring it back to Cathy and to Ted because when you were here last year, last summer at the Summit, you announced that you had this idea, about working on this documentary. It seems like lightening speed that you’re back here. November 2nd, 2007 and there’s a release. That really seems fast, so I’d like Cathy to address how you did that. And then Ted how you narrowed down this list to six people and of course, the challenges you faced in shooting this.
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Cathy Schulman:
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Really the question is - what can you do to narrow the odds trying to get a film like this financed. Most importantly, there is a widening avenue, a small widening, for making movies that have a social consciousness and deal with socio-political issues. It’s small but I think it’s opening up for a number of reasons. First of all, we’re living in a world that’s a really tricky place to live in and I think people are interested in the stories of those people standing next to them. I think that the internet has helped pave the way for a connectivity among cultures, it’s increased certain kinds of awareness. I also think that reality television did a lot to help these kinds of movies because it exposed audiences to a kind of viewing experience that can be a little bit sloppier, messier than standard, theatrical films, with endings that aren’t good endings, and endings that are messy endings or no endings at all. These are the kinds of things audiences have gotten familiar with.
In the case of this particular film, “DARFUR NOW” I thought the most important thing was to involve Don, first and foremost. First of all he knew and cared deeply about the issue, we had talked about it. Then I knew that it was necessary to bring celebrity involvement to the film. It’s a reality of Hollywood. In order for a film like this to have a wide audience, there has to be a celebrity who can draw attention to it. Besides signing on as a producer, Don became a subject in the film for similar reasons He could talk about what it means to be a celebrity drawing attention to an issue but also making fun of himself because it’s kind of a ridiculous truth that celebrities can help bring the attention we need..
Next I called, Ricky Strauss at Participant. By this time, we had already secured a small grant from Steven Spielberg’s Righteous Persons Foundation, about $100,000.00 to start the film. That helped us with our pitch because we were able to put together a sample of what we were going to do in the film and how it could go out into the marketplace. Luckily, Participant was interested in becoming involved and joined forces with us. With the budget we put together, we went out to find a domestic partner who would co-finance the film and release it, or maybe even release it worldwide. Ultimately we were able to find Warner Independent as that partner. They agreed to ‘pre-buy’ it and give us the rest of the money to make it. There were a couple of other studios interested, but Warner was the one that everybody chose to go with and frankly they were willing to give us the most money.
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Bonnie Abaunza/Moderator:
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That’s important --
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Cathy Schulman:
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A pretty important fact. It was unusual, because it actually is the first documentary in the history of the American moviemaking business that was ever pre-bought by a studio. It’s not really normal that it goes down this way. Usually the pictures are financed outside of the system and then bought as acquisitions. But since “DARFURNOW”, there have been a few more pre-buys and it seems to be a beginning.
I think there are a few keys to identifying a piece of material that will work in this landscape Number one, contemporary issues. Number two active issues in process, in other words not issues that are already completed because then you’re walking into historical documentary. Veritae, that’s a crucial thing. Ted will talk a little bit about this too, stories that allow the subjects to speak and the situation to speak for itself. In order to get it out of the realm of television you’ve got to avoid extensive narration and extensive interview. When you see the film, as hopefully you all will, and tell 800 million of your friends --
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Ted Braun:
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Eight hundred million would be a good number --
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Cathy Schulman:
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By the way you have to do that because if you don’t, you’ll never get your movies done because they’ll look to this one to prove that it’s possible. So, that’s a really good reason to do it.
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Ted Braun:
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We’re in this together guys --
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Cathy Schulman:
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Email everybody you know to go see the movie - if there’s an “opening weekend”, other studios are going to say wow, this can work, and then you could sell your film.
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Bonnie Abaunza/Moderator:
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And let me just jump in here, that if you go to
participate.net/darfurnow --
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Cathy Schulman:
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Buy a hat and t-shirt --
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