Conversations: "The Devil Came on Horseback"

The makers of a devastating documentary on Darfur discuss the crisis and how to resolve it in this interview and podcast.

By Thomas Rogers

Read more: Movies, Arts & Entertainment, Sudan, Darfur, Salon Conversations

July 25, 2007 |

In February 2005, the New York Times published photographs of four dead bodies -- one skeletal remains, three intact -- lying on brown, sandy ground. In the most upsetting of the shots, a dead infant -- cheerfully clad in red, with bright blue shoes on his tiny feet -- lies face down in the sand. The photos, taken in the Darfur region of Sudan, had been leaked from classified African Union archives by Brian Steidle, a former U.S. Marine and one of just three American military advisors to the region's African Union monitoring team.

Not long after the photos appeared, Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, the duo behind the award-winning "The Trials of Darryl Hunt," approached Steidle about making a documentary to help draw attention to the crisis. Steidle gave the filmmakers access to hundreds of his photographs -- rare visual proof of Sudanese government-sponsored atrocities -- and allowed their cameras to follow him on a cross-country lecture campaign and on information-gathering trips to Chad and Rwanda. The resulting film, "The Devil Came on Horseback," which opens in New York on Wednesday, is a vivid, kinetic retelling of Steidle's experiences as an observer during the genocide.

The film lays out the crisis in simple terms. Although southern Sudan has been wracked by civil war for more than 20 years, the current situation in Darfur dates back to 2003. Following a rebel uprising in February of that year, the Sudanese government used Arab mercenaries (the "Janjaweed") to attack southern militias and local civilians. The resulting conflict -- in which militias burn villages, torture civilians and rape women -- has claimed, according to conservative estimates, more than 200,000 lives and is now regarded by the United Nations as the world's largest humanitarian crisis.

Salon caught up with Stern, Sundberg and Steidle in May at the Tribeca Film Festival, where the film was screened. Sitting in the filmmakers lounge, the trio spoke about their goals for the film, the solution for Darfur and the ethical dilemmas of making a movie about genocide.

Did you have a specific goal in mind in making this film?

Stern: We wanted to make people aware of what was going on, and give them a simple enough education of what's happening in Darfur that they weren't overwhelmed with too much information, but knew enough to be engaged and understand what the story was and what was happening to Brian as it unfolded for him.

Sundberg: Our hope was to make a film that is going to wake up an audience and have an emotional connection to what's happening -- with the idea that Brian as a voice could bring a different kind of audience [to the film] as opposed to those that are already tapped into African issues.

How important is it to have a Western figure in the film for the audience to identify with?

Stern: We think that the American audience and American distributors need to have a protagonist that is identifiable to them. I don't want to say it has to be an American, but whoever that person is -- in the movie "Hotel Rwanda" it isn't an American per se -- it's somebody with a personal story that we can identify with. In this case it happened to be an American.

Sundberg: Brian, more importantly than being an American, had access to information that very few other people had. He was on an eight-person African Union monitoring team. [Through him] we had the ultimate insider perspective on the Darfur crisis.

Do you think there are advantages in using the visual medium, as opposed to print, in covering this story?

Sundberg: You can read a lot about Sudan, but it doesn't carry the kind of emotional impact that you have with an image. I hate to say it, but words come from the imagination, and people can discount articles that are written by claiming certain atrocities weren't committed. Brian's photographs are proof, absolute evidence of atrocities. It's so valuable for the international community to have that, but it also goes back to what photographs can do.

What was the production process like?

Stern: A lot of the work in this film was done in researching and getting the audio news stories that we used in the film, and gathering other renegade filmmakers' footage that had been shot in Darfur. When Brian brought the story back, Darfur had already been closed to journalists. Of course there are still journalists there now, but I think the footage that was collected in 2003 and 2004, I don't think it's coming back now: of villages being burned, the destruction. It's being covered up better now, or it's just not getting out.

Next page: Can the Sudanese people end the crisis themselves?