Four New York-based reviews/stories:
(In addition, see recent, related interviews from indieWIRE [with co-director Annie Sundberg] and Salon [with Sundberg, fellow co-director Ricki Stern, and Brian Steidle].)
One of the most-tear-your-hair-out depressing moments in the Darfur documentary "The Devil Came on Horseback" comes when the filmmakers visit Rwanda, the site of another modern genocide. Their camera tours a morgue where skeletons from Rwanda's recent ethnic cleansing are preserved in lime and laid out — reminders that the West's promise of "Never Again" has, at least when it comes to Africa, proved an empty one.
What makes the footage especially disturbing is that it follows a steady barrage of images from Darfur: charred human remains, blood-spattered earth, villages going up in flames. The bone-white human remains on display in Rwanda represent that country's unspeakable tragedy, but they also seem to herald a similar fate for the Darfur region of nearby Sudan.
More than 200,000 have died in Darfur's four-and-a-half-year-old conflict, and 2.5 million have been forced from their homes, but the government-aided decimation of Sudan's African tribes is not yet history. Brian Steidle, the steely protagonist of Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern's fitfully engaging documentary, is convinced that something [...] can still be done to stop it.
Mr. Steidle is not your ordinary activist, and this is the primary difference between "The Devil Came on Horseback" and so many other hand-wringing Africa treatises. He's a former U.S. Marine captain from a family of military men. After four years of service, he turned down a desk job [in order] to become a ceasefire observer for the African Union in Sudan — in which capacity he witnessed horrors unlike anything he'd ever seen.
As roving militias called the Janjaweed — Arabic for "devils on horseback" — sweep virtually unimpeded through western Sudan, shooting, raping, and hacking to death unarmed villagers, he uses camera and notepad to document the atrocities. Mr. Steidle leaves shaken by the experience, and angry: Why was nothing being done? In interviews, he recalls, Janjaweed chieftains freely admitted their alliance with Sudan's Arab government. Why did Mr. Steidle's superiors insist on keeping his work secret? "If these photos were released to the public, there would be troops here in a matter of days," he says.
Mr. Steidle later discovers the naiveté of that notion. Upon returning to America, he shares the photographs with anyone who will look, and while they get plenty of media attention — and make him a VIP at a "Save Darfur" rally in Washington, D.C. — it doesn't put army boots on the ground, and the killing in Darfur continues.
This self-effacing ex-soldier remains devoted to the cause, however; he is clearly a results-driven man, and willing to put his dreams of early retirement (and passion for sailing) on hold. Mr. Steidle, who declares that it is both right and necessary to "use force to protect people" and claims [that] he often wished he'd been allowed to carry a gun in Darfur, is also not your typical human-rights crusader. He has no problem calling the Janjaweed evil. It's refreshing to see a guy like this pleading Africa's case.
That said, Ms. Sundberg and Ms. Stern's spotlight on him is misplaced. This is yet another a film about Africa with a white protagonist, but the issue here isn't that Mr. Steidle is white — it's that he's not a natural protagonist. Other observers of Darfur, even if they didn't see what he saw, certainly could have offered insight. And Mr. Steidle, despite — or perhaps because of — his integrity and discipline, lacks the on-screen personality to carry an 85-minute film. E-mails [that] he wrote his sister from the field, which he reads in voice-over, offer assessments such as, "The general situation here is tense."
This is probably why the film opens with enough jump cuts and electric guitar to make you think [that] you're watching "Black Hawk Down." But the filmmakers would have done better to take their cues from the most-moving scene, in which Mr. Steidle interviews an elegant, English-speaking Sudanese man in a refugee camp. As the man explains that America has done much to help him and his family, while his fellow Muslims have done nothing, he seems overcome with both gratitude and distress. After shaking Mr. Steidle's hand, he wanders behind a tent, where he stands, uncertain and unaware that he is being observed, his back to the camera. It's a brief but direct encounter with the reality of Darfur, and it speaks volumes.
From Bloomberg (primary item on page)...
After serving four years in the U.S. Marines, Brian Steidle was looking for another adventure. So in 2004 he took a job as an unarmed observer for the African Union in Sudan, a country racked by a 20-year civil war.
What he saw during his six-month stay in the western region of Darfur radically changed his life and helped alert the world to a neglected humanitarian crisis.
Steidle's experience is chronicled in ``The Devil Came on Horseback,'' a gripping and horrifying documentary about an ethnic slaughter that has claimed an estimated 400,000 lives and driven 2.5 million people from their homes. Since returning from Sudan in 2005, the admiral's son has traveled the world to spread the word about how Sudan's Arab-run government -- backed by a ruthless militia known as Janjaweed (``devil on a horse'') -- has attempted to wipe out Darfur's black African tribes.
``I knew that bad things happen,'' a teary Steidle says near the end of the film made by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern. ``I didn't know the world would stand by and allow them to happen.''
While stationed in Darfur, Steidle took pictures of the victims of what President George W. Bush later called genocide: children burned alive, men with their ears chopped off and their eyes poked out, women raped and cut to pieces. Steidle smuggled more than 1,000 photographs back to the U.S. and showed them to New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, whose illustrated story in early 2005 triggered a huge response from the public and government officials.
Chad, Rwanda
The U.S. State Department, concerned about its relationship with Sudan, asked Steidle to stop showing his pictures. The African Union, which tries to foster unity among African countries, warned him that he could be in danger and the Sudanese government questioned his motives. Yet Steidle, along with his sister Gretchen, continued to speak out about Darfur.
``I'm just some guy who tried to wake up the conscience of a bunch of people,'' he says.
He's being too modest, of course. Steidle is a true American hero, a whistleblower who is largely responsible for the growing public awareness of a monumental human tragedy.
Though he hasn't returned to Darfur because of safety concerns, Steidle has visited refugee camps in neighboring Chad where thousands of families have fled and traveled to Rwanda to learn about the aftermath of the genocide there that was ignored by the international community.
While the African Union still has troops in Darfur, the violence continues. The Sudanese government has resisted calls for a United Nations peacekeeping force and a war-crimes investigation by the International Criminal Court has yet to result in any trials. But Steidle isn't giving up.
``I'm going to talk until no one will listen anymore,'' he says.
``The Devil Came on Horseback,'' from International Film Circuit, opens today [Wednesday] in New York.
"If these photographs were released to the public," Brian Steidle wrote during his six months as an African Union observer in brutalized Darfur, "there would be troops here in a matter of days." Steidle's photographs were released. The troops never came. And the failure of world conscience haunts "The Devil Came on Horseback."
Filmmakers Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern use Steidle as an conduit into the convoluted, damnable situation in Darfur, a region of Sudan whose people have been systematically starved, tortured, raped and killed in a campaign that has seen more than 400,000 murdered and 2.5 million displaced. It's the smart move for the two directors: Steidle is an appealing hero, one whose sense of outrage and dismay will be easily understood by western audiences -- western audiences being the ones who might pressure their governments into action against what Steidle (and any other observer without a vested economic interest) has long understood to be genocide.
The Arab Janjaweed -- "devils on horseback" -- have, with tactical support from Khartoum, attempted to eradicate every black African face from the westernmost area of Sudan. Steidle, originally hired to help monitor a north-south ceasefire between Khartoum and rebel groups, eventually went west, where he found unspeakable atrocities, and a mission. Stern and Sundberg capture the sense of this, and have a great sense of dramatic momentum and of what constitutes engaging cinema. They aren't quite as good in letting the viewer know what's what, or where we are in time. Although it's not entirely clear, re-enactments seem to abound, and what the filmmakers shot and what Steidle shot is all intermingled to a confusing extent. The narration, too, seems to be a re-enactment -- none of what would seem to be news reports are identified as such, so the entire movie lacks a certain grounding in time and specific journalism.
But Steidle is a valiant sort, and there's nothing vague about his feelings for the Janjaweed ("If every one of them was gone, the world would be a better place") or his contempt for Condoleezza Rice. Or his melancholy over the fact that the people of Darfur look with such hope toward the United States, which has thus far barely looked back.
THE DEVIL CAME ON HORSEBACK. (Unrated). Propulsive, provocative documentary about ex-Marine Brian Steidle, who hoped his photographs of Darfur atrocities would bring an end to genocide. Dramatic, anguished. Written and directed by Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg. 1:26 (gore, carnage, adult content). At the IFC Center, Manhattan. Coming soon to Cinema Arts Centre, Huntington.
From the "New York Times" (thanks to the "CFD")...
Brutal, urgent, devastating — the documentary “The Devil Came on Horseback” demands to be seen as soon as possible and by as many viewers as possible. An up-close, acutely painful call to action, the movie pivots on a young American, a former Marine captain named Brian Steidle, who for six months beginning in the fall of 2004 worked for the African Union as an unarmed monitor in Darfur. What he saw in Darfur was unspeakable. And then he returned home, his arms, heart and head filled with the images of the dead.
You see a lot of those images in “The Devil Came on Horseback,” which, in brute form, serves as a catalog of human barbarism. The title refers to the Arab militias known as the janjaweed, which, sponsored by Sudan’s Arab government, have been instrumental in waging a campaign of violence and terror against the inhabitants of Darfur, many of them black. At least 200,000 civilians have died, and millions have been displaced. The atrocities — rape, torture, mutilation, murder — seem endless. So too does Mr. Steidle’s storehouse of graphic photographs and his documentation, which he took with him when he returned to the United States and began sharing with anyone who would pay attention, including Nicholas D. Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times, who [first] wrote about him in a March 2, 2005, column titled “The American Witness.”
Directed by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern, “The Devil Came on Horseback” is a heartfelt account of what this particular American witness saw and, just as important, what he did afterward. It’s necessary, often-agonizing viewing, but it’s also something of a frustrating mess, marred by overly flashy, obtrusive editing and sloppy use of unattributed news sources. Mr. Steidle is an intensely empathetic figure, but sunny images of him from his own childhood threaten to take the documentary perilously off course. His humanity and humility are inspiring, transparent; not once do you feel as if he’s playing to the camera to show just how bad he feels. He doesn’t sell his pain, so there’s no reason for the documentary to either.
The news about “the crisis in Darfur,” “the conflict in Darfur” and “the violence in Darfur” continues apace. Recently the stars of “Ocean’s Thirteen,” led by George Clooney, donated $5.5 million for aid relief; other American citizens have organized car washes to raise money. In early May, 15 House Republicans sent President Bush a letter urging action in Sudan: “The time is at hand to reassert the resolve of the United States that the atrocities taking place in Darfur cannot stand.” In late June, Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio put the issue in stark terms during a Democratic presidential debate: “Let’s face it, if Darfur had a large supply of oil, this administration would be occupying it right now.”
There’s really nothing more to say — and there’s everything else to say — but because I [Manohla Dargis] cannot improve on Mr. Kristof’s passionate words on Darfur, I will repeat the final lines of his 2005 column about Mr. Steidle, which are worth repeating again and again, until peace at last makes them irrelevant.
“But if our leaders are acquiescing in genocide, that’s because we citizens are passive, too. If American voters cared about Darfur’s genocide as much as about, say, the Michael Jackson trial, then our political system would respond,” he wrote. “As Martin Luther King Jr. put it: ‘Man’s inhumanity to man is not only perpetrated by the vitriolic actions of those who are bad. It is also perpetrated by the vitiating inaction of those who are good.’”
THE DEVIL CAME ON HORSEBACK
Opens today [Wednesday] in Manhattan.
Directed by Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern; directors of photography, Jerry Risius, Phil Cox, Tim Hetherington, William Rexer II, Ms. Sundberg and John Keith Wasson; edited by Joey Grossfield; music by Paul Brill; produced by Ms. Sundberg, Ms. Stern, Gretchen Wallace, Jane Wells, Ira Lechner, and Eileen Haag and Cristina Ljungberg; released by International Film Circuit. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 85 minutes. This film is not rated.
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