It is amazing to me when I read about people in other parts of the world who think of the United States as a paradise. As one who has lived in the U.S. his whole life and who spends more time than he ought reading and expressing criticism of this country, it astounds me when I hear that there are people who think of America as a literal paradise rather than just a nice play to live compared to other places in the world.

I prefer going to the earliest Saturday showings of movies. I usually go by myself, and I like to have the theater as much to myself as possible. I believe that movie-watching is a personal, solitary experience. Friends of mine have argued this point, but the dark quiet theater immediately before a movie starts is for me our culture's best approximation of perfect aloneness in a public place. So, when I walked into the noontime showing of Lost Boys of Sudan, fifteen minutes before showtime, and saw that the good rows of the theater were filled with people, my heart sank. But, as it turn out, this would not be the usual, miserable packed-theater experience. It actually turned out to be very interesting. But, I'll get back to the audience later.

The title of the movie documentary, Lost Boys of Sudan, refers to the fabled group of boys from the Christian and animist south of Sudan whose villages were attacked by the Islamist national government in the course of a Civil War which has been ongoing since 1955, with an 11-year respite. When their villages were attacked, the boys' parents were either killed or became separated from them. The boys, without a place to live and without anyone to take care of them, gradually coalesced together and fled the fighting by going on a long, dangerous journey from Sudan to Ethiopia. Following a change in government in Ethiopia in 1991, the boys were forced to flee again, going back to Sudan, finding Red Cross camps along the way for food, water and aid, eventually finishing their journey at the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya. From the start of their trek in south Sudan, they had traveled more than 1,000 miles, and of the 26,000 boys who began the journey, only about 10,000 made it to Kakuma, with many of the boys along the way dying from hunger, thirst, fatigue, attacks by lions and other wild animals, eating poisonous leaves, and any number of other afflictions. As a side note, the plight of the Lost Girls of Sudan is even more heartbreaking and their troubles are still far from over (see here and here).

This background information is presented in several lines and a brief voiceover at the beginning of the movie. The documentary is not about the boys' journey to Kakuma, it is about the lives of those who went to the United States, where more than 3,000 of the boys were resettled.

Before the boys have left for the U.S., when they are still in the refugee camp, is when we hear America described as being a "heaven on Earth". There is a poignant moment late in the movie, after the boys have been in our country for nearly a year, when Santino, one of the two Lost Boys featured in the movie, reflects on his struggles in America- struggles to pay rent, to get a driver's license, to make friends, to deal with the petty crime in his lower-class neighborhood, to try to get an education- and he admits that America is not heaven, that there is no heaven on Earth.

Pauline Kael once said that, as a veteran moviegoer, she found herself thirsting more and more for the kind of reality and true insights that can only be provided by documentaries. There's something to that; I can't remember the last documentary I went to see that I didn't enjoy at least a little bit, but it is difficult for me to think of the last time I went to the movie theater and saw a fiction film I enjoyed at least a little bit.

I don't know that any fiction film could ever drive home the alienation of living in a big city the way Lost Boys of Sudan does. To be honest, the film is something of a bait-and-switch. Anyone wanting a full story of the Lost Boys will be disappointed. Instead, we get a portrait of life in the city. It is the archetypical portrait of loners in the big city, further exemplified by the history of the loners; they are not just country bumpkins or naïve teenagers; they are transplants from a refugee camp (in addition to being teenagers from a rural upbringing). Also exemplifying the experience is the alienation ability of the city itself. Though I'm sure that the Houston Chamber of Commerce people would disagree with me, since the time that I moved to Houston seven years ago, I've come to realize that Houston is a city that feels like it is packed more with pavement than people. Though I've never been there, I imagine that Los Angeles is probably much the same. People here get in and out of their cars, in and out of their gated apartment complexes, in and out of the strip malls and restaurants, but they are rarely just out and about, fraternizing. If you would drive through the city, at any random time, through any random part of the city, I'd be surprised to hear if you saw more than a couple people walking around for every 3 or 4 blocks of city you drove past. These boys coming from Sudan have $7/hour jobs. If you don't want to spend two hours' salary on an overpriced meal or on the cover charge for a weekend bar or club, where do you meet people in the city? I don't know, to tell you the truth. Judging from the troubles of Peter and Santino, the two boys featured in the movie, they don't know either.

People who live in countries where an unemployment rate of 30% is the norm look over in awe at the U.S., where we complain about the present 5.7% unemployment rate. Jobs abound, food abounds, everybody has a car and a house or an apartment in which to live, everyone has a TV, running water, electricity, every town has paved roads and a grocery store, every city is packed with movie theaters, museums, schools, and shopping centers. But Lost Boys of Sudan shows us what's missing. In the few scenes in the refugee camp, we see what they have, a community, and, later on, after they come to America, we understand the boys' depression over losing it. One of the intersting dynamics that comes out in the movie is the boys' relationship with black Americans (the boys, by the way, are black). They came over perhaps expecting some hostility from white Americans and Americans of other races, but I don't think they expected it from black Americans. The boys, because of their low-paying jobs, have to live in a poor neighborhood, and they experience all of the troubles that poor neighborhoods have to offer. Theft, vandalism, guns, petty macho violence are what the boys find in their new lives. And, unfortunately, the source of those things is predominantly the black people in their neighborhoods. So, when a local church group comes by to drop off furniture (it is worth mentioning, especially for me who has been at times very critical of religion in America, that much of the support for the boys in the U.S. comes from religious groups, including the Y.M.C.A., which gives the boys classes in English and a short orientation on what they need to know to live in America and job hunt assistance, and local church groups, who donate furniture and sundry other items to the boys), David, one of the Lost Boys, complains to the woman in charge of the furniture drop-off how bad American blacks are. The woman (who is white) tries to explain that there are good and bad people among all races, but the boy stubbornly refuses to believe her. Later on, when the boys go on a retreat celebrating their first-year anniversary of living in America, one of them complains that white Americans are scared of him, while black Americans pick fights with him.

The movie is not all misery and complaints, though. In fact, much of it is rather refreshing and enjoyable, and we get to experience the goodness, unpleasantness and strangeness that is our country through the eyes of these boys. As they land at the airport, one of the boys exclaims that since there are no cars within sight, they'll have to walk to the city. Peter's story, in particular, becomes one of hope. After despairing of finding friends or gaining an education in Houston, he moves to Kansas. He enrolls in a high school there and goes through pretty much the same high school crap any American boy might go through- working at Wal-Mart, trying unsuccessfully to find a girlfriend, going out for the basketball team, not making it, and finally, graduating high school. There are still small moments of outsiderness. When he is at a church youth group event, everyone is joining in a song except Peter, who sits quietly in the back, presumably because he doesn't know the words. When a girl whom he likes stops by his apartment, he presents her with a gift, a couple of birds in a cage, which he hopes she'll enjoy because she likes animals. When she asks him where he bought the birds, he said he didn't, he went out and caught them. It's weird, isn't it, that it's a bad thing to catch free birds and put them in a cage, but it's not bad to buy birds from a pet store and keep them in the cage where they lived their whole lives. Of course, free birds should stay free, and caged birds couldn't survive in the wild, but it is understandable that someone from Kenya wouldn't pick up on this. Birds are birds after all. It turns out alright, though. The girl sits down with Peter on his couch and they look at pictures from the refugee camp, pictures of his buddies and all the people he knew there.

Santino stays on in Houston. He meets people at work. One lunchtime, they convince Santino to go out with them instead of working through lunch. When they give him his order and he takes a bite, he says that he must remember what this is he is eating, so if he comes back to the restaurant without them, he will know to order it. "A cheeseburger" he says out loud so that he will remember. He orders videotapes from a correspondence school to learn how to be an electrician. He dreams of one day going back to his village in Sudan and bringing electricity to his people.

There were black people and white people filling the movie theater where I saw Lost Boys of Sudan. Many of the black people were wearing colorful African garb. While the movie played, they giggled and pointed out people they recognized on screen. These people in the movie theater were refugees from Sudan, the same kind of refugees as were in the movie (though some of them in the theater were women). It was the kind of experience I would almost certainly not have had if I had went to see a big Hollywood movie. After the movie was over, I felt like I should talk to them. But what could I say? What could I ask them? Could I tell them it was a good movie, or that I was sorry that things seemed to suck so much for the Sudanese who came over to Houston? Should I ask them about the people in the movie whom they knew, how those people were doing now? I don't know if I really wanted to know, and they seemed like they were having a good time talking to each other about the movie, so I walked out without saying anything, happy myself to have seen a good movie and to have experienced it with them.