All About Darfur

Since early 2003, the western Sudanese province of Darfur has been the stage of a bloody conflict. The fight mainly rages between the Janjaweed (government-backed troops recruited from local Arab tribes) and the non-Arab inhabitants of the region. The British director Taghred Elsanhouri is Sudanese by birth and applies her personal experiences to capture the racial and tribal conflicts in Darfur and the rest of Sudan, in word and image. Elsanhouri does not show any shocking footage of her war-torn and famine-stricken country; on the contrary, she limits herself to conversation. Disarmingly, she questions men as they drink tea, but also a university professor, a newspaper editor, her driver and cameraman, her grandmother, a tea seller and the young men at her tea shop. Albeit sometimes reluctantly, in the end they all answer her questions and formulate in their own words what they think about Darfur, their society, politics and origins.