Reese Witherspoon’s New Movie Sheds Light on US Lives of Sudan’s Lost Boys
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ABC/Image Group LA(NEW YORK) — Reese Witherspoon’s latest campaign has taken the star of movies such as Legally Blonde far from the glamour of Hollywood.
“It was one of those things where I was like, ‘I can’t not do this movie ’cause it’s so important to me,” Witherspoon told ABC News.
The Walk the Line Oscar winner’s new movie, The Good Lie, tells the story of the Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan, orphaned children who walked hundreds of miles, without food or shelter, to escape the civil war in 1983.
Fifteen years later, a humanitarian effort brought 3,600 Lost Boys and Girls to the U.S. to start new lives.
The Good Lie, set to be released October 3, is inspired by the children’s stories as well as the U.N. program that brought them to the U.S. The actors playing the Lost Boys were either Lost Boys themselves or descendants of Lost Boys; all of them fled Africa for the U.S. or U.K. as children.
The film’s producers launched a fund this month to help raise monies for those in the Kakuma refugee camp, which Witherspoon visited in 2013 with her daughter.
Witherspoon plays a tough-talking employment counselor who is assigned to find the Lost Boys jobs when they first reach the U.S.
Some of Witherspoon’s co-stars lived that hardship, including Emmanuel Jal, a hip-hop artist and former child soldier.
“This is the story of my home,” Jal said. “This is the voice of those who was not heard.”
The Good Lie is not just about where the Lost Boys started, though; it’s also about how far so many have come.
On Wednesday night, former Lost Boys Thon Chol, Kuol Awan, John Dau and Moses Ajou, as well as several others, were honored during a special gala and congressional screening of the movie. The gala also helped raise nearly $400,000 for the Good Lie Fund, with all monies going to the Kakuma camp.
Chol, a former Senate intern, works for the government of Washington, D.C., and is a leader in the Lost Boys community, and more broadly as a refugee advocate. Awan fled Sudan in 1987. He now lives in Phoenix, Arizona, serving as executive director of The Lost Boys Center for Leadership Development in Phoenix.
Dau fled Sudan in 1987 and resettled in Syracuse, New York, in 2001, and is now the president of John Dau Foundation. And Ajou joined the U.S. Air Force and served tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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