Mad about Uganda: how a movie mobilized the campus community
Posted 5/1/06
More than a million college students have seen the movie, but their parents have never heard of it. And no, it's not Girls Gone Wild.
Rather, it is a story of a world gone wild, where kids of grade-school age flee their homes at night to escape bands of marauders from the Lord's Resistance Army, a rebel group that has
abducted about 25,000 children to serve as guerrilla soldiers and as sex slaves. And the imageshundreds of boys crammed together, sleeping at bus stops, and hundreds of other boys with machine guns slung over their shouldershave given birth to a movement that is dedicated to ending this horror.
In 2003, three young Southern California filmmakers set out for Africa to make a movie. They had few plans, little money, and no real idea what to film. After a month in Sudan, they then traveled to neighboring Uganda, where they ended up filming Invisible Children: Rough Cut. The film, which came out that year, has been shown at high schools and college campuses across the United States.
And while the crisis in the Darfur region of Sudan has garnered most of the attention among the media and human-rights activists, the plight of the children in northern Uganda is all but unheard of. Since the film came out, the
filmmakers have set up a nonprofit foundationInvisible Children Inc.to organize protests and to urge lawmakers to act. For Saturday, the nonprofit organized a Global Night Commute, during which approximately 50,000 people were to sleep outside in 136 cities across the United States. U.S. News spoke with the Jason Russell, the film's director.
What drew you to Africa?
Between junior and senior year [as a film student at the University of Southern California], I went to Kenya, and it really captured my mind. America was the 1 percent of the world that had freedom and capability to do other things. I really felt an obligation to go back to Africa. I asked 10 friends to go with me, and two said yes. And I asked friends for 10 bucks here and 20 bucks there, and we bought cameras on eBay. The stories going on in Africa are worth dying for. Not that we wanted a
martyrdom story, but it was really worth going over there to tell a story.
Was it your plan to make a film about the children of northern Uganda?
Uganda chose us, I think. We were in Sudan, and where we were in the mountains, there were very few people. They had all fled to surrounding countries, and we decided to go to one of those countries to see where the Sudanese refugees were going. We went to Uganda not knowing what its own internal conflict was. A British reporter said to follow the story of the children: "Why are kids sleeping in the cities?"
How long were you there?
We were in Africa for two months and in northern Uganda for four weeks. We were staying in an abandoned building and found old mattresses. We finally checked into a hospital after a couple weeks to get a shower.
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