Director's Statement

Whenever I'm asked about why I took the decision in November 2004 to borrow a friend's camera and go to Sudan to make All About Darfur, I would say it was an emotional compulsion to be in the country of my birth at a time of crisis.

In December 2005 when the film screened in Khartoum at the British Council, for the first time to an ethnically mixed Sudanese audience, I realised that emotional compulsion was only part of the answer. I also wanted passionately to create a film that would be in the words, and through the eyes, of ordinary Sudanese and that would speak to them as well as to the rest of the world.

As I experienced watching the film with my first Sudanese audience, I realised that I was a daughter returning to her homeland at a time of crisis not out of an emotional compulsion. Rather, it was out of a conviction that with love and with the benefit of insight and distance that I have as a person who is inside and yet outside Sudanese culture, I can through the film appeal to Sudanese people to find the good will inside themselves to put aside complacency and denial and begin a process of critical self awareness and debate about the paradoxes, racial and economic, in our society that precipitate so much war and suffering.

Furthermore, I was frustrated with the images of silent, suffering people in Darfur depicted by the standard broadcast media in the West. I wanted to make a film that would give voice to the people of Darfur and that would not define them solely by their suffering but also pay homage to their dignity, courage and fortitude.

Taghreed Elsanhouri
Director, All About Darfur