By Bob Tourtellotte LOS ANGELES, Nov. 2 (Reuters) - To hear three key people behind the new documentary "Darfur Now" tell it, they were just average folk who wanted to help the victims in the war-torn region of Sudan, but did not know what to do or how to start. Yet director Ted Braun, producer Cathy Schulman and activist Adam Sterling did not let their lack of knowledge deter them. They acted in the spirit of the advertising slogan, "Just Do It." Schulman, the producer behind Oscar-winning race relations movie "Crash," asked actor and activist Don Cheadle for advice on how to tell the victims' saga on film. She met with Braun, a maker of television documentaries, who was spurred to make a movie about Darfur by his agent. Sterling's story is different, but it is at the core of "Darfur Now," which opened in major U.S. cities on Friday. "I didn't have resources available. I didn't have a Hollywood agent or Don Cheadle," he said. "We started small." In fact, the 24-year-old university student was working as a waiter when he began turning his skill for organizing people into a campaign seeking corporate and government divestment of funds that help support the Sudanese government. Sterling launched the Sudan Divestment Task Force in April 2005, and since then more than 50 universities, 15 states and five cities have restricted their Sudanese investments. As told in "Darfur Now," he started by handing out fliers on his college campus. One action led to another and soon he was meeting legislators and helping change policy. For Braun and Schulman, making "Darfur Now" was not that much different. DOING IT IN DARFUR "Every day in Darfur, we thought we might get kicked out," said Braun. "I'd get up in the morning and think, 'The odds are so stacked against us' ... but then I'd think, 'What is it I'm not doing that I could?' and then I'd just do it." Darfur is a region of western Sudan where a civil war has raged since 2003. Experts estimate that 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been driven from their homes. Sudan says 9,000 have died. "Darfur Now" follows six people who work in various ways to end the conflict or help victims, and Braun's filmmaking style keeps to a recent trend in non-fiction movies of employing many of the narrative techniques used in fictional dramas. Sterling and Cheadle are two subjects. Another is Luis Moreno-Ocampo, a prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, who is charged with bringing the region's criminals to justice, and Pablo Recalde, whose convoys deliver food -- sometimes while under attack -- for the World Food Program. The other two are victims in the region, Ahmed Mohammed Abakar, a one-time farmer and builder now living in a refugee camp, and Hejewa Adam, a mother who decides to join rebel forces after her infant son is beaten to death. As in typical documentaries, Braun interviews experts and government officials, but he also takes audiences along on his subjects' personal journeys. In one segment, his camera crew is with a band of rebels in the field when they come under fire. "When a voice inside you says, 'No, doing (that documentary) is too tough,' It makes you think, 'Maybe I can. It can't be any harder than what those guys over there are dealing with. Let's see what I can do.'"
