Islanders assist in a filmmaking mission in troubled Darfur.
When island producers Michelle Lang Levis and Bob Ness got wind of a globally minded film project, they decided to “pay it forward.”
The two islanders have signed on to help raise awareness and funds for a filmmaking effort by veteran war correspondent Chris Kline, who hopes next month to get on the ground and filming in the Darfur region of Western Sudan.
“I’m the kind of person who, once I anchor myself to a project, I see it through,” Levis said. “I’ll knock on doors.”
Kline’s mission, and by association, that of Levis and Ness, is to engage in what the trio refers to as “hard-access, high-risk reportage” that will take him beyond the relative safety of Khartoum and the Sudanese refugee camps and into deeply conflict-ridden territory.
He wants to tell Darfur’s story from the point of view of people who live there – which is a deeper story than the one he believes corporate-run Western media organizations are supplying to their audiences.
Ness and Levis, professional acquaintances for a number of years on the island, worked together for the first time earlier this summer when casting an on-screen host to cover the worldwide rollout of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.
Through that project, the two met Kline, who didn’t participate but helped them find someone who could.
When they learned of his current drive to raise funds to film in Darfur, they endeavored not just to repay a professional courtesy but to commit to getting the word out.
“I’m quite impressed with his resume and what he’s intending on doing in terms of opening the gates and really putting himself out there as a maverick journalist, to really tell us the story,” Levis said. “We’re not really getting what’s going on.”
The conflict in drought-ridden Darfur is enmeshed in a long history of competing interests among the cattle-raising Arab Bagarra nomads, moving southward from northern Rizeigat in search of water for their livestock, and the non-Arab farming communities – the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa – to the south.
Armed conflict escalated in early 2003, when farming communities began to seek economic equality within the Sudanese state. On one side of the conflict were the Sudanese military and the Janjaweed – a militia comprised largely of members of the Bagarra; on the other, southern rebel groups, notably the Sudanese Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement.
To date, hundreds of thousands non-Bagarra civilians have been killed in the conflict, in what some refer to as the first genocide of the 21st century.
Kline and his multi-national crew, with collective work histories in 30 war zones including Chechnya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Lebanon, Yugoslavia, Ulster, Sierra Leone and Azerbaijan, have made agreements with the Sudanese government and others to enter the conflict and film from the people’s perspective.
Having concluded negotiations only recently, Kline’s Frontier Dispatches production company is now in the midst a funding push. Because such agreements can be “fluid,” they hope to enter Darfur by late September.
Kline’s passion for this project is multi-layered, drawing from both a humanistic drive to bear witness to the true complexity and vast scope of the conflict, and from what he believes to be the “ethical imperative” of his work as a journalist.
And he’s making this film as an independent because the networks won’t back him to go where he wants to go, and tell the story as he believes it should be told.
“Anything that smacks of great risk is something (television networks) aren’t willing to undertake,” Kline said. “They’re willing to take correspondents to camps, but they aren’t willing to go beyond that.”
To Kline’s mind, a problem equal in scale to corporate media’s fear of liability – of making waves and subsequent “lock-down” in areas of the world such as Darfur and Afghanistan – is the poor informational diet that television news is feeding the public, particularly in America.
“If you constantly feed people a diet of garbage, and tell them it’s caviar,” Kline said, “then after awhile they’re not going to know the difference between garbage and caviar.”
So in the spirit of Michael Moore and the success of 2004’s “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Kline hopes to produce an independent film of a higher intellectual caliber.
He doesn’t think Americans are as complacent or eager for drivel as he thinks the Fox News Channel would have them be.
“Quite frankly, I have a little more faith in people,” he said.
Although Kline looks at Darfur, with its intricate knots of strife and its drought-ridden window into climate change – “a very dark window into the future” – he still believes journalism is a noble calling at its heart, and he believes in the good of humanity.
And when considering the challenges he and his crew are up against as they film on the ground and as they try to counter a corporate media system, Kline paraphrases Leo Tolstoy.
“In a world of darkness, all we can do is add our light to the sum of light,” he said.
“And we’re willing to add our sum of light.”
************************************************************************************
Sad conflict
To learn more from Chris Kline’s local contacts about his efforts to film in Darfur, email Michelle Lang Levis at mlangcasting@earthlink.net or Bob Ness at robertness59@msn.com.
