Sinfo January 2009

More than 7,000 viewers have seen the Slovenian documentary ‘Dar Fur – War for Water’ by the directors and screen writers Tomo Križnar and Maja Weis, which is a great success for a documentary.

The movie shows the mission of Tomo Križnar, an independent journalist and activist for the rights of indigenous people. Jože Biščak, the director of the GiEDON Agency predicts it will be the most viewed Slovenian movie this year.

In the documentary, Tomo Križnar tries to find out what really happened in 2006 in the forbidden, surrounded and besieged territories of Darfur, when he was sent there as a special representative of the former Slovenian president Janez Drnovšek, and when the Sudanese government charged him with espionage and imprisoned him for a month and a half.

The film has received extraordinary attention at all the film festivals where it has been screened, among others in Cannes, Amsterdam and Warsaw. In Durban, South Africa, it received a special mention from Amnesty International. The film was also screened at the festival of documentary films in the Bahamas in December and will participate at the international film festival in Teheran, Iran, in January.

The film was a co-production between the Bela Film production company and TV Slovenia, with the financial help of the Slovenian Film Fund. Like the documentary ‘Nuba, Pure People’ Križnar's latest documentary is predicted to help achieve peace in Darfur by mobilizing the domestic and foreign politicians, activists, humanitarian organizations and masses.