Reality
Without Hyphen
Two refugees grapple with America.
Lost Boys of Sudan
Directed by Megan Mylan and Jon Shenk
Reality tv has degraded people’s concept of documentary and non-fiction filmmaking. Lost Boys of Sudan restores integrity to the non-fiction film. Better than a reality tv gimmick, directors Megan Mylan and Jon Shenk address global politics and recent history by following two Sudanese youths who, in 2001, resettled in the United States. Peter Dut and Santino Chuor were discovered in Kakuma, a north Kenya refugee camp to which they escaped after being orphaned in the Sudan’s civil war (in which two million Dinka tribesman were killed). Their story is told without condescension. We’re encouraged to scrutinize and commiserate, which makes it a rarity in these documentary/mockumentary days.
Mylan and Shenk don’t tell you everything about these young men’s lives, but their desolation and resilience say a lot. You are witness to a sufficient amount of the boys’ perseverance to recognize their individual intelligence and sensitivity. These New Americans are as much a new screen archetype as Jean-Pierre Leaud was in The 400 Blows, where Truffaut spotlighted a sociological supernova. They have a legitimate claim on our attention due to their closeness and to their ability to reflect our own conditions.
These figures exist in brilliant contrast to the virtually faceless indigent types of Michael Winterbottom’s In This World, which focused on the chic subject of Middle Eastern turmoil. Using the even more chic style of digital-video recording, director Winterbottom affected a theatrical version of tv’s Survivor or The Great Race, merely to show off his hipness and liberal bona fides. Mylan and Shenk appear to have mixed film and video to better convey the details of Peter and Santino’s globetrotting journey. It’s a felicitous, not ostentatious, style. The change of light from the fields in Kenya to the interior airplane fluorescence of the jet-age middle passage to the harshly sun-lit American strip malls delicately communicates experience and transition. A viewer’s perspective stays as surprised and expectant as Peter and Santino’s.
Seeing a world of hardship, adaptation and struggle up close is far different from what most non-fiction filmmakers and reality tv producers take on. Reality tv ignores poverty and destitution, holding out the promise of fame and luxury. Although that hoax is what seduces viewers, eventually limiting their sense of compassion, Mylan and Shenk admit that that promise is also part of what Peter and Santino hope to find. Above all, the boys want opportunity, safety and community, and this makes the youth story in Lost Boys of Sudan seem fresh. Stepping off the plane optimistically, heading for the apartments, classes and jobs set up by the YMCA, the boys carry certain sadness inside themselves, recalling the change-weary characters in Jan Troell’s 70s epics The Emigrants and The New Land. But Mylan and Shenk keep a respectful distance from that weariness. What makes the film moving–and nearly as great as Troell’s saga–is the unspoken awareness of what’s on the other side of the boy’s journey. The reality of contemporary American life looms dauntingly large, turning Lost Boys of Sudan into a tale of two individual awakenings.
American filmmakers don’t normally explore immigrant and labor issues. Recent European dramas such as the Dardenne brothers’ La Promesse and Andre Techine’s Loin have shown imaginative concern with those experiences. Lost Boys of Sudan takes a sociological approach, yet it has the suspense of fictional storytelling. Will America’s diverse forms of civility (churches, schools, social organizations) enable Peter and Santino to find the peace they’re looking for? It’s what philanthropic Americans themselves are still striving toward. Once here, the Sudanese orphans are dispersed to Texas, North Dakota, Chicago, Utah, Nebraska, California. They need jobs, but they also need a proper orientation befitting their circumstances (they’re actually teenagers but the war destroyed official records of their ages). Peter gets work in Texas and Santino lights out for Kansas City where, as a high school student, he ventures to study while earning money to send back home to a needful sibling.
These intriguing conditions are almost a Twilight Zone allegory of the African slave experience. Mylan and Shenk casually contrast Peter and Santino with the African Americans who cross their paths. There’s distance between them–except when the Sudanese complain that Houston thugs rob and harass them; even a black student on a high school basketball team stands aloof from Santino. It’s like watching the past clash with the present. (The lost boys advise each other, "Don’t act like the people who wear baggy jeans, who do all the bad things in America.") What a fortuitous assessment of cultural evolution in the West. The entire diaspora history of enslavement and dislocation can be felt in the simple shot of Santino by himself sitting on grass that turns out to be his high school campus–not home, not paradise, just displaced. Scenes of Santino watching an MTV broadcast of American kids on spring break in Cancun convey new depths of alienation. Spiritual, financial and cultural despair combine for a unique estimation of the black man’s social progress.
It’s remarkable that Mylan and Shenk show this without cynicism. Perhaps it’s because quiet and conscientious Peter and Santino offer them models of grace. (They resemble Djimon Hounsou in In America.) The boys’ persistence and resolve indicate a worldview quite different from the typical emigrant bromides (made melodramatic in House of Sand of Fog) and the usual native-born gripes (made sensational in much hiphop rhetoric). Accepting the auspices of Christian charity and African tolerance, Mylan and Shenk achieve a clear-eyed vision. When one of the white Texas hosts hears one of the boys’ laments, her hope almost collapses. "He’s very angry," she says, but there’s respect in her realization. The humanitarian cause of relocating the Sudanese youth raises bigger problems than anyone imagined, but Mylan and Shenk point out some awesome ironies.
Santino’s Kansas experience puts him in the midst of white Christian teens trying to bridge their cultural gap. One kid tells Santino, "You don’t need to worry about girls right now, just have fun," to which he reasonably responds, "What do you mean?" In Texas, Peter encounters a Wal-Mart supervisor who, on a scorching hot day, rudely says that as an African he should be used to working in hot weather. This is no Peter Pan daydream; Lost Boys of Sudan faces the deep divisions of Western racism. Peter regrets the situation he’s thrust into: "I feel odd. The black people here are brown. I don’t like that I’m so black [that people ask] where does this kind of black person come from?" This reality is underscored when scenes of Peter at a Sudanese liberation gathering are intercut with Santino at a mostly white teenage Baptist social. After the Sudanese civil war introduction (in which Christians and animists were killed by Islamic fundamentalists), Mylan and Shenk opt to show people yearning to fulfill their humanity. Peter and Santino, like their Christian sponsors, are all reaching for understanding.
In an English as a Second Language class, Santino is asked to answer in a complete sentence, "What would you do if you had a million dollars?" It recalls a similar language class scene in Agnes Varda’s The Gleaners and I, but by letting the question resonate, Mylan and Shenk focus on American social values. The best reality tv programs, America’s Top Models and The Apprentice featuring Donald Trump, expose the machinations of American competition in surprisingly–deliriously–instructive ways. However, the get-rich premises of those shows are far beyond the workaday survival tactics Peter and Santino need. Although they don’t get any further than working-class suburban milieu, the boys express their alienation saying they feel they are "among the children of the rich." That line exposes what reality tv takes for granted.
Lost Boys of Sudan refocuses reality. One of the boys surmises, "Now it’s clear, there’s no heaven on Earth." Old World wisdom responds to New World chaos. The observation is devastating precisely because it’s said without rancor or pathos. This film relays the truth with simple accuracy.
