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Surviving Sudan

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Reporting on a Hellish Situation From the Inside
By KEN TUCKER

Television journalism doesn't get much more participatory than "Surviving Sudan," a first-person plummet into the hellish conditions under which the displaced natives of Darfur live. Sorious Samura, the reporter and producer of the program, spent a month living among refugees traveling to a camp in Chad, where they hoped to find food and shelter. Over the course of the program, he quickly sketches in the details of what the United Nations has termed one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world - countless instances of murder, rape, arson and starvation since fighting began in 2003 between the rebels of the Sudan Liberation Army and the janjaweed, the government-backed Arab militia.

Mr. Samura reports that over 200,000 of the more than a million refugees have been making their way to Chad, most of them on foot. Entire families are forced to slog along parched, treeless land, going for days without food, only to arrive at makeshift camps where the makeshift bureaucracy for registering to receive the most minimal sustenance would be comic were it not so brutally tragic.

Addressing the camera directly as he does frequently throughout the hour, Mr. Samura starts this documentary by telling us that he'll travel with one family, eating and sleeping no more than they do. At first it seems as though, to impose a dramatic structure on a real-life calamity, he is creating a sort of grim variation on "Survivor," and when we see him howl in pain and collapse along the journey because a thorn pokes through his shoe, we are tempted to think he's a bit of a showboater.

Well, he is, but in a television tradition that goes back as far as Edward R. Murrow, Mr. Samura - a man with a handsomely round face and a soothing deep voice - knows that inserting oneself into a story as a being-here-now presence can, at its best, transcend TV-reporter gimmickry and yield undeniably potent, truthful images. And so we see Sudanese women, when a group of refugees stops to rest, taunt the men in their group with chants of, "Why are you hiding from the Arabs?" - they want these physically exhausted fellows not merely to relocate them and humbly ask for food, but to fight for their freedom. We see these people gather wood to chop up and carry to small towns to sell for food, even though there's little demand for anything that increases the heat in this country. And, almost inevitably, we see Mr. Samura drop from exhaustion - "I'm completely knackered," he tells the camera - while men, women and children continue to labor all around him, as he moans, "I'm so ashamed of myself."

"Surviving Sudan" finds its most poignant figure in a man called only Adam, who says bitterly of the janjaweed, "They stole our land and property," and who is now reduced to being overjoyed at receiving a small amount of sugar from a kind countryman, along with the promise that his family will be put on a list to become officially designated refugees and thus eligible for a tent and more food. Mr. Samura makes it clear from the brusque manner of the camp leaders that Adam's chances are slim, his hopes almost hallucinatory.

Finally, Mr. Samura - the producer of the excellent 2000 documentary "Cry Freetown," about the civil war in his native Sierra Leone - cannot bear even the pretense of reportorial objectivity anymore. "I use my contacts as a journalist," he says, to bring in a local United Nations representative to help get Adam and his family on the list with some assurance of care before the filmmaker packs up his cameras to leave. A result is a bittersweet conclusion to a powerful report that portends no good news in the immediate future.