Since 2003, when an ethnic rebellion in Darfur, Sudan, drew a lethal government response delivered primarily through Arab nomad militia called Janjaweed (“devils on horseback”), tens of thousands of mostly Muslim African citizens have died, and more than a million have been displaced into “safe areas.”

But for activist aid groups tracking casualties, the huge numbers rolling in were not necessarily rolling up into an adequate worldwide response. The worry was that in the context of so much other tragic math reported out of Africa — Congo, Rwanda, South Africa — the unimaginable numbers were merely numbing.

But when Charles MacCormack, president and CEO of Save the Children, a non-profit worldwide child assistance organization, broached the subject of Western awareness with board member Dr. Bob Arnot, a veteran network commentator and journalist, Arnot had a ready solution.

“A lot of the humanitarian organizations just have no way to really tell their stories.... What [“Darfur”] does, in terms of further democratizing broadcasting, is to turn what might have been a 4-second sound bite into an opportunity to really tell a story people need to see and hear.”

“Charlie told me there’s so much of the world now that Americans don’t see — it’s as if they have space helmets on,” says Arnot. “And he asked what we in the international humanitarian community could do to really show Americans the problems. I’d been working as a backpack journalist on some shorter pieces, so I said why don’t I try it long-form in Darfur.”

Hour Glass

The results of his work, a one-hour documentary “Darfur,” which premiered recently at the meeting of American Refugee Committee in Minneapolis, puts compelling faces against the numbers still mounting in Darfur.

Among the featured faces in the film are Dudley Conneely (“Save’s man on the ground there, a real inspiration”), Andrew Natsios, the chief U.S. diplomat, and two nearly dead Sudanese children who get progressively better as the film proceeds. These last two faces, ironically, figure largely in communicating the true impact of a bracing set of counter-numbers the film is eager to report — 350,000 Sudanese lives saved through the efforts of Save the Children alone.

“A lot of the humanitarian organizations just have no way to really tell their stories,” says Arnot. “They can only be sound bites in somebody else’s story. What this does, in terms of further democratizing broadcasting, is to turn what might have been a 4-second sound bite into an opportunity to really tell a story people need to see and hear.”

Going Mobile

Given the magnitude of the mission and the volatility of the country, the surprise is in how little Arnot required beyond his Save the Children mandate to tell the story.

With just a few lightweight DV video cameras, a PowerBook G4 computer running the Apple Production Suite (Final Cut Pro HD, Motion, DVD Studio Pro), extra storage drives, Arnot, a mobile-broadcast pioneer, was able to shoot, capture and sequence much of his documentary while still on the ground in Darfur for a fraction of what it would have cost to send a traditional crew.

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