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“Upset about what we’re leaving behind”
Student’s MTV documentary reveals plight of Darfur refugees
By Jessica Ullian
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Andrew Karlsruher (COM’08) spent seven days in March touring refugee camps in Chad and talking to refugees about their experiences. The interviews were used in an mtvU documentary that aired on April 7. Photo courtesy of Andrew Karlsruher |
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As Andrew Karlsruher’s seven-day trip to central Africa was ending in late March, he began thinking about the high and low points of the journey. The COM freshman had gone to Chad with mtvU, the MTV network’s college channel, to film a documentary about the devastating effects of civil war in Sudan. When the trip began, he was excited. As it concluded, he was conflicted.
“I am looking forward to getting back ‘home,’” he wrote in his journal, “but upset about what we’re leaving behind. We’ve heard a lot of horrible stories and seen a lot of people suffering, but in the end it’s just a vacation for us; a ‘great life experience’ and an opportunity to make a documentary. Everyone we have met . . . lives this constantly, and probably will for a long time.”
“It was an amazing experience,” Karlsruher (COM’08) says now. “But the more I learn, the more unsure I am of what’s going on.”
The 19-year-old film major was one of three student correspondents selected for mtvU’s trip to Chad to interview refugees from the region of Darfur, in Sudan. The project, called STANDFast, was a collaboration between mtvU and the student activist group Students Taking Action Now: Darfur (STAND), which is forming on college campuses around the country. The documentary aired on April 7, timed to coincide with the 11th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
Aspiring filmmaker Karlsruher first established a connection with mtvU through a family friend and had worked with the network whenever it filmed in Boston. When the network asked him to go to Chad, he knew little about the deadly conflict between indigenous Africans and Arab militias in Darfur, in which tens of thousands have been killed and millions displaced; he initially thought his role would be largely technical.
“I just wanted to [film] something,” he says. “I didn’t know much that was happening in Sudan.”
When his training began in New York a few days before the group was scheduled to leave, Karlsruher realized the need to prepare for the worst. The correspondents — besides Karlsruher, a student from Swarthmore College and a student from Georgetown — were taught how to respond to a wildlife attack, a hostage situation, or a kidnapping. They were told of the gruesome attacks on Sudanese villages, which often killed the entire population, and were shown pictures of the weapons they were likely to see during the trip.
The group arrived in the Chad capital of N’Djamena on March 22, and the daily schedule of traveling to refugee camps around the country followed. Karlsruher would film live interviews, and then other crew members would interview the student correspondents about the process.
The stories were as bad as Karlsruher had been led to expect: every refugee had lost at least one family member, most of the women had been raped, and all had walked for more than 40 days, from Darfur to Chad, to reach the refugee camps, where food and water were in limited supply. The translator who helped them with the interviews was risking his life by doing so. “As we were leaving the camp, [his] family told him to never come back,” Karlsruher wrote in his journal, which was published on the mtvU Web site. “They are scared that he is in danger from the Chadian gov’t for helping us.”
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Refugees walked for more than 40 days, from Darfur to Chad, to reach the refugee camps, where food and water supplies were limited. Photo courtesy of Andrew Karlsruher |
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The professional experience he gained proved both exhilarating and exasperating. As a camera operator, Karlsruher found he was so focused on getting the shot that he often missed much of what was said in the interviews. When he saw the rough footage during the editing process, he would hear a story for the first time even though he had been in the room during filming. Operating the camera “kind of blocked me from the emotional stuff,” he says. “It was pretty frustrating.”
The crew returned to New York on March 31, and edited the 50 hours of footage into a half-hour documentary. It was shown on Thursday, April 7, and more than 160 colleges and universities across the country participated in a day-long STANDFast event in which students gave up some luxury or necessity for the day and donated the money saved to refugee aid organizations.
The response has been encouraging so far, Karlsruher says; he feels the project was able to show college students the problem “in a way they can connect to.” His own experience, he says, is an example: he knew little about the violence in Sudan before the trip, but hearing the individual stories made the crisis much more real for him. One of the more painful aspects, he says, was refugees asking him to bring them back to America. “You just feel helpless,” he says. But one of the more hopeful moments came when he learned that $15 will provide one refugee with meals for a month.
“It’s showing that even though it’s a huge problem,” he says, “you can make a huge difference.”
29
April 2005
Boston University
Office of University Relations