Serious Movie Lover

John Bul Dau meets the natives at a Syracuse, NY public pool.

GOD GREW TIRED OF US (2006/DVD) Once in a while we fat Americans should be required to watch (on our awesome and equally fat flat-screen HDTVs) a film that reminds us just how lucky we are. The next time that spoiled-rotten ankle-biter of yours complains about his PS3 not networking online proficiently enough, sit ‘em down (no candy!) for a family viewing of Christopher Dillon Quinn’s devastating 2006 documentary God Grew Tired of Us, a story of inspiring tenacity and amazing personal heartbreak on a global scale.   God Grew Tired of Us tells the story of the Lost Boys, a moving city of broken children ranging in age from 3 to 13 (in a marching line stretching over a mile long) that for five long years in the late 1980s fled certain death in war-torn Sudan on foot through over 1,000 miles of jungles and deserts—TWICE, first to Ethiopia and then to Kenya—the group of 27,000 eventually cut down to 12,000. That’s a hell of a subtraction: 15,000 dead kids. And we’re talking kid kids here—Lost Boy John Bul Dau tells a particularly sad story about how, due to his impressive height, as a 13-year-old he had been placed in charge of a group of over 1,200 smaller kids, and how his first lesson as a leader was how to “bury the bodies.” Dau’s heartbreaking story is just one among many—each one as sobering as the next.  

Catching up with the surviving Boys in the early 2000’s—still housed nearly on top of each other in a Kakuma, Kenya, United Nations refugee camp that resembles a prison with its imposing barbed wire fences—we find that, although there is rarely enough food, and the Boys live day to day with nothing to do and nothing to look forward to, they have remained shockingly positive, choosing to create and nurture a hierarchal social system based on brothers helping brothers. A few of the older Boys (now grown men in their 20s and 30s) are chosen to be resettled in the United States by the International Rescue Committee, with the ultimate goal of turning these Boys into a part of the American blue-collar work force.

We follow four particular Boys’ journeys into their ‘70s-era suburban apartment complexes—three in Pittsburgh, PA, one in Syracuse, NY—and eventual employment, with each carrying two or three menial jobs, and a couple choosing to get their GEDs and take college courses on top of that. The small steps and great leaps they take in adapting to their strange new surroundings—learning to use electricity, refrigerators, trash cans, and faucets with cold AND hot water—play like you’d expect in any, say, Friendly Visiting Alien from Outer Space Movie. Starman, for example. It’s a testament to their strength of character that, coming into a world so completely unlike the one they’ve known, with so many entertaining distractions, they never veer from their single-minded course: to make an increasing amount of money (whether via rising through employment ranks or continuing their education) to send back home to their extended family and, hopefully, bring them to the US. And after respectfully repaying the US gov’t for their airfare, and thoughtfully coping with that good ol’ American institution, racism—the Boys are told not to enter area businesses in groups of more than two, so as not to frighten white business owners—that’s exactly what they do.

Several of these moments will stick with you—particularly a joyful and beautifully awkward mother-son reunion in an airport, flooded by a TV news crew’s invasive lights. This is American Dream stuff, writ large, so please pay attention, junior.

*For a bleaker, less uplifting treatment of the Lost Boys saga, seek out the DVD of  the also excellent 2003 P.O.V.-aired doc The Lost Boys of Sudan—following a different set of Lost Boys than featured in this film—and then cry for like two weeks.

Grade: A+

Tags american dream, civil war, immigration, John Bul Dau, lost boys, racism, Sudan