A documentary by Ted Braun. In English and Arabic with English subtitles. Rated PG. Opens Friday, November 9, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

With every month bringing a new, highly personalized documentary about an ecological or humanitarian crisis, it seems appropriate that Darfur Now would take the approach of spotlighting what six people around the globe are doing about the genocide in the western part of Sudan rather than simply showing us the crisis and hoping we'll be moved to act.

Unfortunately, Darfur Now only moves us to applaud these six individuals and then head home, more confused than ever about what's going on and how we can help.

Since 2003, as many as 450,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been displaced due to ethnic and tribal conflicts in the Darfur region. The documentary fails to clarify who exactly is fighting whom and why, although the Sudanese government comes across as the biggest bad guy, with China's oil-grubbing support.

Filmmaker Ted Braun spent the first four months of 2007 in Darfur, and he's captured searing footage of burned-down huts, town-hall meetings, and women who've lost everything taking up arms against the government-sponsored Janjaweed militia. A plaintive scene shows these women guarding a hill, reassuring each other that the "white man" will soon arrive to help.

Braun then widens his scope to include the viewpoints of a refugee-camp leader, a western aid worker, and an Argentinian judge trying to prosecute Sudanese officials in the International Criminal Court. By the time Braun gets to Los Angeles, where we're asked to care about what a student-turned-activist and Hotel Rwanda actor Don Cheadle think, a crucial sense of perspective is lost. When one of your subjects is a woman whose baby was beaten to death, who wants to see a student hugging his dad or a celebrity composing a speech on monogrammed paper?

Link: Darfur Now on MySpace