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‘Gimme Shelter’ Highlights Congo Crisis
The United Nations is getting a little help from its friends Ben Affleck and Mick Jagger, who’ve joined forces to release a short film “Gimme Shelter,” in efforts to raise $23 million for 250,000 refugees driven from their homes by renewed fighting in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
The funds will go toward the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees’ efforts to provide clean water and emergency aid kits for people in the North Kivu province, where the film was recently shot.
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“We made the film in order to focus attention on the humanitarian crisis in the DRC at a time when too much of the world is indifferent or looking the other way,” Affleck, who directed the project, said in a statement. “The suffering and loss we’ve all seen first-hand is staggering – it is beyond belief.”
The movie, set to the Rolling Stones song of the same name, tells the stories of Congolese families who’ve fled the fighting and are now living on next to nothing.
“I hope this video will help highlight the plight of the hundreds of thousands of displaced people and also the thousands of innocent people who are needlessly losing their lives there,” Jagger said in a statement.
The film can be viewed at unhcr.org.