"Just Do It" spirit prevails in film "Darfur Now"

By Bob Tourtellotte

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - To hear three key people behind the new documentary "Darfur Now" tell it, they were just average folk who wanted to help the victims in the war-torn region of Sudan, but did not know what to do or how to start.

Yet director Ted Braun, producer Cathy Schulman and activist Adam Sterling did not let their lack of knowledge deter them. They acted in the spirit of the advertising slogan, "Just Do It."

Schulman, the producer behind Oscar-winning race relations movie "Crash," asked actor and activist Don Cheadle for advice on how to tell the victims' saga on film. She met with Braun, a maker of television documentaries, who was spurred to make a movie about Darfur by his agent.

Sterling's story is different, but it is at the core of "Darfur Now," which opened in major U.S. cities on Friday.

"I didn't have resources available. I didn't have a Hollywood agent or Don Cheadle," he said. "We started small."

In fact, the 24-year-old university student was working as a waiter when he began turning his skill for organizing people into a campaign seeking corporate and government divestment of funds that help support the Sudanese government.

Sterling launched the Sudan Divestment Task Force in April 2005, and since then more than 50 universities, 15 states and five cities have restricted their Sudanese investments.

As told in "Darfur Now," he started by handing out fliers on his college campus. One action led to another and soon he was meeting legislators and helping change policy. For Braun and Schulman, making "Darfur Now" was not that much different.