“God Grew Tired of Us: The Story of the Lost Boys of Sudan”
Lost Boy and documentary filmmaker will speak Thursday, February 28
Documentary filmmaker Christopher Quinn and John Bul Dau, one of three Lost Boys of Sudan profiled in Quinn’s prize-winning feature film God Grew Tired of Us, will visit Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, in February as part of the college’s Speaker Series.
Quinn and Dau will speak at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 28, in the Reed Union Building’s McGarvey Commons. Additionally, the film God Grew Tired of Us will be shown at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, February 27, in 117 Reed Union Building, and at noon on Friday, February 29, in the Samuel P. “Pat” Black III Conference Center in the college’s Research and Economic Development Center. Admission to all three events is free and open to the public.
God Grew Tired of Us, which won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival, is narrated by Nicole Kidman and executive produced by Brad Pitt. The film grew out of Quinn’s visit to a refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya, in July 2001; he intended to document the hardships suffered by the estimated 25,000 orphans who traveled barefoot and against all odds across thousands of miles of sub-Saharan desert to escape Sudan’s civil war. Instead, Quinn found a compelling story on an airplane filled with Lost Boys chosen by the International Rescue Committee for relocation to the United States.
Over the next four years, Quinn and his crew made regular visits with three of the plane’s occupants, two in Pittsburgh and John Bul Dau, whose resettlement was sponsored by a church in Syracuse, N.Y.
“I wanted to make sure that this was more than a ‘fish out of water’ story. I knew there was much more,” Quinn said of his film. “This story was about coming into a new world and, despite the fact that it was daunting and crazy and upside down, I was thinking that once these three got their footing, they would turn their attentions back to helping their friends and family in Africa, which is exactly what happened.”
Quinn’s film poignantly captured Dau’s experience with both external culture shock—from women driving cars to an endless food supply—and internal struggle. Dau, who was forced to flee his village in 1987 ahead of the government militia, is finally safe and well fed after 14 years of deprivation, yet painfully isolated from the brotherly fellowship that enabled him to survive Sudan’s civil war.
Now 35, Dau learned to read and write in New York; he’s since earned his associate’s degree and is currently a student at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. Dau located his parents and siblings in Uganda and Sudan, and raised the money needed to bring his mother and a sister to live with him in Syracuse. He’s also founded two nonprofit organizations to help Sudanese youth: The Sudanese Lost Boys Foundation of Central New York, which raises money to pay for books and medical expenses for Lost Boys in the United States, and the American Care for Sudan Foundation, which is building the first health clinic in Duk County, Dau’s birthplace.
Quinn and Dau’s Erie appearance is sponsored by the Janet Neff Sample Center for Manners and Civility at Penn State Behrend. The college’s annual Speaker Series is supported by the Student Activity Fee, the Division of Student Affairs, and the Harriet Behrend Ninow Memorial Lecture Series Fund.