POSTER

Karim Chrobog

2008/ 94' / SAD
Director: Karim Chrobog

AWARDS:

Tribeca International Film Festival, New York 2008 - Audience Award
MAUI International Film Festival, 2008 - Audience Award
Truly Moving Pictures Film Festival – Crystal Heart (winner)
Bologna International Film Festival, 2008- Best Documentary Film Award
Bergen International Film Festival, 2008, Norway – Best Documentary Film Award  

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR:

Karim Chrobog, producer and director, started his career in the Time Warners international public policy office, where he worked closely with companies like Warner Bros, HBO, Fortune and Turner. In 2005, he launched Tangier Pictures, an independent feature film company based in Washington, DC. He holds a degree in International Politics, and a certificate in Business and Diplomacy at the Georgetown University.

ABOUT THE FILM:

During the two decades of the civil war in Sudan, between the northern, predominantly Arab and the southern, Christian part of the country, two million people died, while four million have been displaced. Emmanuel Jal discovered the horrors of the conflict as a seven-year old (he lost his mother, and his father sent him to Ethiopia to save him from the war). Karim Chrobog's documentary debut, while reconstructing Jal's life from an orphan to a soldier and from a refugee to a hip-hop star, points out to the lost generation of African children on whose behalf the „music of the soldiers“ speaks today, soldiers whose life stories betray the conventional notions on war victims. As most of his peers, Jal decided to leave the refugee camp in Ethiopia (which is in fact a military training camp) and return to Sudan to join the army. In an interview, Jal explains that the reason was a longing for revenge, but he also says: „if I hadn't done it, today I would be a slave, a commodity sold to work on sugar plantations”. However, war horrors soon became too real and together with three hundred of his co-sufferers, he decided to escape from the SPLA (Sudan's People Liberation Army). Going trough gruesome moments of weakness, hunger, and hopelessness he finally met a British humanitarian worker Emma McCune, who sent him to Kenya, where he, for the first time in his life, sat in a classroom. This unbelievable experience, transformed into rhymes and film shots, is a witness of survival, struggle, strength of the spirit and is a growing up story, sublimating the ability of human will to transform tragedy into hope, pain into truth, suffering into action. Emmanuel Jal is today one of most active ambassadors of his country who devotes his energy into enhancing educational programmes in Sudan (he is the founder of Gua Africa Foundation www.gua-africa.org which supports education in Africa).