Don Cheadle and Warner Take On The Darfur Genocide

Warner’s documentary release, Darfur Now, is now on video priced at $4.99 – Warner Home Video is donating a portion of the proceeds to the Jewish World Watch’s Solar Cooker Project.

The Solar Cooker Project provides solar cookers to families in refugee camps, usually made up of widows caring for orphans, so that women do not have to leave the safe confines of the camp to search for cooking firewood. These women, who have managed to escape the genocide in Darfur and make their way to Chad, often become victims of rape, beatings and mutilation while searching for wood in the desert. In under two years, the Project is already being recognized for reducing the incidence of attacks on women refugees along Sudan’s border.

This is yet another example of the point Darfur Now is trying to make. Although it was filmed in and about the war-ravaged region in Sudan, it is not a movie of despair. Rather, in an effort to motivate people around the world to take notice and get involved, the film is one of hope as it follows the stories of six individuals who are working to combat the genocide in different ways: One helps financially, another by persecuting war criminals in the Hague, others by getting food to the starving, joining a rebel group to fight, running a refugee camp, and Don Cheadle, attempting to explain genocide and informing how to stop it.

Producer Cathy Schulman told Rotten Tomatoes in an interview: "[We] wanted to make a movie that was about making a difference as opposed to doing an exposé; a movie that had hope. For Don [Cheadle] and I, [it] was so important to us to answer a certain question. In our own lives we ask, “Why, when we hear tragedies happening on other sides of the world, do people say, ‘Well, that’s too bad but it’s so far away and so complicated, what can I possibly do?’” So the question was, ‘Can we make a film that brings the conflict closer?’"

The answer, it seems, is yes.

A $30 donation to the Solar Cooker Project will provide a family with two solar cookers, two pots, two pot holders, a year’s supply of plastic bags and skills training for refugee women and girls.