15 Devastating Documentaries That Mustn't Be Ignored

8. The Devil Came On Horseback (Ricki Stern & Anne Sundberg, 2007)

In recent years, journalism has grown in ways unimaginable thanks to the help of the internet and in particular, social media; you don't have to look far to find documentaries about Iraq or thousands of images and videos of the fall of the World Trade Centre. Unfortunately, this really hasn't been the case for one of the most horrendous travesties of recent human history, the genocide in Sudan. This is the story of Brian Steidle, a former US Marine, sent into Darfur, Sudan to record the ceasefire between the North and South and the bringing of peace in place of the civil unrest. Soon, he realises that what he's witnessing is ethnic cleansing, performed by a militia group called the Janjaweed, enabled by the government themselves. With access to parts of the country that no other journalist has, he begins a personal journey that becomes a mission to bring the despicable events of a war on non-Arab black Africans by a country to the mass media and the attention of a world naive to it. Documented in graphic detail, using video and photography, making this a difficult but astonishing visual experience as well as a thought-provoking one. It is genuinely startling to wonder how a nation can keep such abomination a secret and even more so, just how lucky some of us are to be a world away from it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HJc8l-a46Q