Refuge

Saturday November 22, 2008 at 10 pm ET/PT on CBC News Network

GENOCIDE OR CIVIL WAR?

Troubled by the headlines coming out of Darfur, Jonathan Pedneault works to raise awareness about the horrors of genocide among fellow Canadian students. But something is missing. The human face behind these stories. So the young student convinces filmmaker Alexandre Trudeau to go to Sudan with him. Their search brings them face-to-face with tragedy.

As Jonathan and Alexandre try to secure passage to the western Sudanese region with a group of rebels, stories of growing human despair unfold against harshly stunning landscapes. Making their way through eastern Chad, they come across NGOs struggling to get food to the starving. Darfurian refugees fighting for water. Families living between walls made of branches, in limbo, as more and more people battered by civil war trickle into the camps. All live on the brink of survival.

Rebels finally take the filmmakers clandestinely to Western Sudan and into the heart of the war zone. As the team tries to understand the geo-political realities that plague the region, a bond develops with one of the rebel leaders. A lawyer who decided to fight for his people, he tries to protect the region from forces that are much bigger than his rag-tag group of young soldiers. Their fight for freedom from oppression is a daunting one. And the damage done to the region hard to fathom. There, the team finds the remnants of systematic devastation: villages burned to rubble and old women scrapping through dirt for food. They find dozens of families trapped in the desert as they wait for rescue, in the harsh wind, sand, and hot sun.

Jonathan and Alexandre's journey reveals that, in Darfur, children and their families live on the edge of disaster, with nowhere to go. Without refuge. And tragedy waits for everyone at every corner.