The Devil Cam on Horseback

Brian, welcome to hell."

Brian Steidle is a retired Marine who has volunteered to be an official observer in the Darfur region of Sudan. It is, indeed, hell.

The Devil Came on Horseback is a documentary about the genocide in that part of Africa, and the film's strength is that it shows us the horror, rather than tells us about it. It's painful to watch.
 



Steidle is the key to the film, in several ways.

The young man from a military family left the Marines as a captain and went to Sudan in 2004 to monitor the cease-fire between the Islamic government in the north and the largely Christian rebels in the south. Officially, he's neutral.

After several months of hearing about violence in the west - the Darfur region - he changed responsibilities and became an observer to the ongoing genocide. He sent in official reports and took thousands of photographs. Later, he found out, few of his reports were passed along to the people who needed to read them.

When Steidle couldn't take it any more, he left and smuggled out his reports and photographs.

It's through Steidle's eyes, and through his photographs and video, that we see the events. They are brutal, gruesome, violent and horrifying - burnt bodies, rotting flesh.

"When we entered the village after the attack, I noticed a sound that I thought was an electric hum, but soon discovered was millions of flies on the dead."

We hear so often about the violence in Darfur, and the statistics - 400,000 murdered and starved, more than 3 million made homeless - but reading such things in print are oddly disembodied. We can act shocked and shake our heads and tsk-tsk all we want.

But seeing the black smoke rising from the mud-hut villages, and seeing the jeep-loads of thugs speeding away from the carnage, laughing and yelling, and seeing the children with their brains smashed out is not something you can passively or theoretically condemn. You feel it viscerally. It is immediate.

In the face...