Lost Boys of the Sudan
What are the implications of the video "The Lost Boys of the Sudan"?
"The Lost Boys of the Sudan" is not merely an expose of the violence occurring in this African region. It also forces American viewers to confront the disparity between their own lives and the lives of the individuals in the video. By humanizing and personalizing an underreported national tragedy, the documentary demands that the viewers show more care and concern about what is happening in the Sudan and also that Americans take responsibility for how the prosperity of America is founded upon a world economy still divided between the developing and the developed world.
The Sudanese refugee children of the film were brought up to be herders, to live an agrarian life. They assumed they would live as their parents had lived. Perhaps some Americans were unaware of how industrialization had not touched many regions of Africa, until seeing the film. Then, an ethnic conflict tore the boy's region apart. The beginning of the film shows how genocide is not just something that happened in the past, but continues to happen today. When the boys come to America, through the generous efforts of relief organizations, the boys must not just learn a new language but adjust to a society where cars and supermarkets are a way of life. The boys also enter a far more diverse society, where even African-Americans judge skin tone and color differently than their own society. The ethnic conflicts that spawned genocide are not present, but America itself is divided in its own way.
The boys, close-knit at the beginning of the film, grow farther and farther apart as the faster-paced, more spread out American existence divides them. They are not 'lost' in the sense that they have been transported away from a situation that did not offer them a future, but the acculturation process into America is a loss to the children, of their original culture and way of life. Genocide did not kill them, or their culture, but even escaping from genocide they experience a loss of their sense of cultural and national identity.
