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Houston, we have a problem
The documentary "Lost Boys of Sudan" could be less aloof from its subjects — two orphaned youths brought from war-torn Sudan to live in the alien environment of Texas — but it's still a worthwhile look at American life through foreign eyes.
By PETER THEIS
Offoffoff.com
Some documentaries, rather than make a case, capture an organic
process. "Lost Boys of Sudan," a film by San Francisco-based filmmakers Megan
Mylan and Jon Shenk, is such a documentary, treating the development and
adaptation of two Sudanese refugees who hail from a Kenyan refugee camp but
find themselves groping for purchase in America's smooth plains.
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| LOST BOYS OF SUDAN |
Directed by: Megan Mylan, Jon Shenk.
Featuring: Santino Majok Chuor, Peter Kon Dut.
Cinematography: Jon Shenk.
Related links:
Official site
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| SCHEDULE |
Film Forum
209 West Houston St. (between 6th and 7th Ave.)
(212) 727-8100
Feb. 18 — March 2, 2004
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The background of the two teenage boys, Peter and Santino, wrings
the heart, and it is clear why humanist filmmakers would take an interest in
them. We learn in the opening montage, a narration over children's drawings
of the ordeals seen and suffered, that Peter and Santino's villages were
razed in lightning raids during the prolonged civil war between the Islamic
northern inhabitants and the Christian and animist southern peoples. Both
Peter and Santino, along with tens of thousands of other fleeing children
(mostly boys), were separated from their parents, who either died in the
massacres, died soon afterwards, or disappeared. The children escaped south
to Kenya, and having been placed in a U.N. refugee camp, became known as the
"lost boys" of Sudan.
Ten years later, America, in its selective beneficence, agreed to
resettle several thousand lost boys within its borders, and the
documentary's story is set in motion. Peter and Santino, speaking good but
accented English, are selected. Both are Christians, and at the first point
where the thorny racial subtext of the film emerges, the refugee camp pastor
implores the America-bound to not become like those youths who "wear baggy
pants." And then, the inevitable pledges that Peter and Santino make to
those left behind: a promise to remit money (in the case of Peter, who has a
sister in the camp), a promise not to forget the Dinka tribal values, and
finally, and a promise to return to Sudan and use the knowledge gained to
help those who could not go to America. An earnest moment that becomes a
reference point for the rest of the film, and their journey begins.
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After the stock "natives meet the modern world" moments, the film gets
down to its real business of charting the effect of the American environment
on Peter and Santino and a few dozen other lost boys, who are plopped down
in Houston. Santino lands an assembly-line position in a plastics factory,
and Peter gets a similar job. Both express disappointment at the lack of
educational opportunities, and the lost boys all implore a church charity
liaison to provide education, not more furniture. These pleas are in vain; the
government has abandoned the lost boys to find their own way. They have
little choice but to work the grating, subsistence-level jobs just to afford
food and rent.
During this early period, the film captures the whole group of boys
collectively making pointed observations about the new mores thrust upon
them. For example, they jokingly note how one can't touch another man or
hold his hand, as he will recoil in homosexual panic. This fits snugly in
the film's agenda of showing American cultural foibles through the
perspective of more communal-minded outsiders. Some observations of the
boys are less benign, however; repeatedly, throughout the film, the boys
(although Peter and Santino are not guilty of the more egregious examples)
voice regressive and sweeping stereotypes about American black men.
However, the issue of race, as it plays out in the lost boys' identification
of themselves in America's social order and America's reciprocal
racialization of them, receives only a desultory, almost indifferent
treatment.
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| | The film is so consciously unobtrusive that it aspires to little more than witness. It misses what should be its clear dramatic center: the break between Peter and Santino. |
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Of much more interest to the filmmakers are the material paths that
Peter and Santino travel, and how those paths change their priorities,
communal ties, and views of America. The remainder of the film can be
either understood as either an indictment of the demoralizing, corrupting
effect of prosperity's promise, or understood as a narrative of triumph
where a hardworking and talented emigre will find success no matter what the
obstacles, thanks to benign government officials and good-hearted,
Midwestern religious folk. This is either the strength or weakness of the
film depending on what you want from a documentary; it is so consciously
unobtrusive that it aspires to little more than witness, permitting the
audience to draw its own conclusions according to its own preconceptions.
Nevertheless, despite its noncommittal style, the film makes subtle
comments about the transformative effect of starting anew in America. It
closes with Peter and Santino on different tracks, Peter on the path to
achievement and success while Santino struggles to escape a Nickel and Dimed
purgatory without prospect of advancement. Yet the film complicates both
the triumph of Peter and failure of Santino. Peter, soaking up America's
individualist ethos, gradually sheds — even betrays — his compatriots, both in
Africa and America. His actions thrust him into a TV-flickering isolation
where he is still too exotic to find true companions among his American-born
peers. Santino, on the other hand, remains true to his communal ethic and
the pledges he made when leaving Sudan. In the end, in addition to
remitting money to Africa and supporting unemployed and sick lost boys, he
works to learn the electrician's craft so that he might help wire Sudan when
its terrible conflict subsides.
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The downside to the film's delicate subtlety, however, is that it
misses what should be its clear dramatic center: the break between Peter and
Santino. Peter enacts the quintessentially American dream of abruptly
pulling up stakes and hitting the open road (moving to Kansas), and, other
than a brief call to Santino, no further interaction occurs between what
were tight friends. The filmmakers' stubborn artistic commitment to keeping
the illusion of their own non-presence, which manifests itself by an absence
of any interview-style questions of its subjects, precludes the film from
exploring this in full. But the film suffers; exploring the split between
the two friends would have intimately dramatized the costs of Peter's
individualistic evolution, and made his evolution less opaque.
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| | Apart from the stories of Peter and Santino, the film has a wealth
of Midwesternisms which convey the region's earthy feel, and will make any
native of the region smile and cringe. |
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Apart from the stories of Peter and Santino, the film has a wealth
of Midwesternisms which convey the region's earthy feel, and will make any
native of the region smile and cringe: gratuitously large houses grouped on
lonesome flatland; the religions of Christianity, basketball, and the
automobile; Sonic fast food; opulent suburban schools with P.E. teachers of
questionable sanity ... and of course, Wal-mart.
But the soul of the film is
in the minds and hearts of the two boys. Although it can make no claim to
be a representative depiction of the immigrant experience in America — very
few immigrants are beneficiaries of a generous government resettlement
program, and arrive speaking good English — "Lost Boys of Sudan" is a
documentary that subtlely shows that America is no heaven, and that becoming
American can be a Faustian process where the cost of escaping a dead-end
destiny may be the loss of an intangible part of the self.
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FEBRUARY 18, 2004
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Reader comments on Lost Boys of Sudan:
lol from brittany, Sep 22, 2004
Re: lol from Christelle, Nov 24, 2004
ok from gana adouk, Feb 13, 2006
hi from gana adouk, Dec 14, 2004
Re: hi from Rebecca, Sep 23, 2007
Santino from Sheryl Dunn, Feb 17, 2005
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