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 "There is a beautiful message throughout: We are all the
same," said Witherspoon, whose plays employment counselor Carrie
Davis in the movie that made its Washington premiere on
Wednesday.
"We all deal with conflict and seemingly bear the unbearable in
our lives, but we have to do it together," she said of the story
of children who flee Sudan's unrelenting ethnic violence. "We
have to be there together. We have to be there for each other."
The film, by "Boardwalk Empire" writer Margaret Nagle and
Canadian director Philippe Falardeau, stars Sudanese actors
Arnold Oceng, Emmanuel Jal, Ger Duany and Kuoth Wiel - who each
have a personal story about Sudan and its civil war.
Based on experiences of actual Sudanese refugees in the
sprawling Kakuma camp in Kenya, the film begins with the journey
of siblings who survive an attack on their village and walk
hundreds of miles to a United Nations camp, gaining and losing
companions along the way.
There they make it onto a humanitarian flight to the United
States where the three men are resettled in a strange new land.
Witherspoon's character is as lost as the refugees for different
reasons.
'JUST AS LOST'
"When I met with the director, he said 'I want you to understand
that this isn't a movie about you. This is about the Sudanese,'"
said Witherspoon, who doesn't appear until more than 30 minutes
into the film.
"We didn't try to turn it into an American actor vehicle. I
wanted my character to be just as lost but in a different way."
Rather than "a character who is this great white hope who is
saving African people, she is actually just as emotionally
distraught," said Witherspoon. "She is without her family."
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 Jal, who plays Paul, was one of the actual Lost Boys
recruited by the South Sudanese Army who later escaped to the
refugee camp and sneaked into Britain in real life.
Now a hip-hop artist and spokesman for the Make Poverty History
campaign, he called the film "almost the story of every person
that went into" the refugee camp.
"The first time I witnessed war I thought the world was ending,"
he said. "I didn't know about death, and I ended up as a child
soldier."
Duany, who plays Jeremiah, came to the United States as refugee
when he was 15. He recently returned to the refugee camp to visit
his mother, who still lives there, and to search for his sister.
"If you look at the world, it is not only Sudan or African countries
that are going through chaotic times," he said. "I have gone back to
my country to find my family. We have signed peace agreements, but I
never get to see peace," he said of the violence that still plagues
South Sudan.
Witherspoon said the Sudanese actors not only taught her what it's
like to be a refugee but also showed her "gratitude and grace" with
which they deal with life.
"Being an American woman growing up in the South," she said, "these
things were incomprehensible to me - when they talk about being
children and starving and walking thousands of miles to a place they
weren't even sure they were going to be safe."
(Editing by Mary Milliken and Cynthia Osterman)
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