The Devil Came on Horseback
Brutal, urgent and devastating
"The Devil Came on Horseback" is a documentary about the human-rights crisis in Darfur. It's also about our response to the human-rights crisis in Darfur -- not just the West as a whole, but you and me and the guy down the hall. You don't want to think about another faraway ethnic cleansing? Fine; here are pictures. You still don't want to think about it? All right -- why?
If that sounds like a self-righteous guilt trip, the movie's anything but. Rather, filmmakers Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern have built an engrossing, thought-provoking moral position paper on the back of one Brian Steidle, an ex-Marine who found himself working as a cease-fire monitor in Sudan in early 2004.
Steidle got the job via the Internet and quickly realized how deeply he was in over his head. The cease-fire between the Muslim government forces in the north of the country and the black animist revolutionaries in the south held everywhere but in the primarily Muslim western province of Darfur, where government-backed militias known as "janjaweed" -- "the devil on a horse" -- massacred entire villages, man, woman, and child.
"Devil" wants very much to poke audiences in their hardened sensitivities, aware many of us are too busy shutting out the body count in Iraq to think about a preventable human-rights catastrophe in northern Africa. The film shows chief prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo of the International Criminal Court in The Hague readying a case against the Sudanese government that has yet to bear real fruit. Steidle is seen visiting genocide memorials in Rwanda and crumbling in exhausted tears over how little we've learned.
"We've said 'Never again' again and again and again," says a weary Steidle at a rally on the National Mall. "And here we are again." (T. Burr, Boston Globe)
The Devil Came on Horseback
Wed September 26, 2007, 7:00 & 9:00, Muenzinger Auditorium
USA, 2007, English & Arabic w/subtitles, Color, 85 min, Unrated, DV printed to 35mm, 1.85:1 • official site
Tickets
10 films for $60 with punch card
$9 general admission.
$7 w/UCB student ID,
$7 for senior citizens
$1 discount to anyone with a bike helmet
Free on your birthday! CU Cinema Studies students get in free.
Parking
Pay lot 360 (now only $1/hour!), across from the buffalo statue and next to the
Duane Physics tower, is closest to Muenzinger. Free parking can be found after 5pm at the meters
along Colorado Ave east of Folsom stadium and along University Ave west of Macky.
RTD Bus
Park elsewhere and catch the HOP to campus
International Film Series
(Originally called The University Film Commission)
Established 1941 by James Sandoe.
First Person Cinema
(Originally called The Experimental Cinema Group)
Established 1955 by Carla Selby, Gladney Oakley, Bruce Conner and Stan Brakhage.
C.U. Film Program
(AKA The Rocky Mountain Film Center)
First offered degrees in filmmaking and critical studies in 1989 under the guidance of Virgil
Grillo.
Celebrating Stan
Created by Suranjan Ganguly in 2003.
C.U. Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts
Established 2017 by Chair Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz.