A post by Xeni Jardin (Don Cheadle's new Uganda doc Journey into Sunset, April 20) at Boing Boing made me aware of a new documentary. When Don Cheadle went for a fundraiser screening of Hotel Rwanda in Uganda, he took his family along, and filmmaker Rick Wilkinson made a documentary of the trip, which was to benefit the children who hide every night from the rebels of the Lords Resistance Army, who want to conscript them. The short film is called Journey into Sunset.
I had admired Cheadle's (mostly) comic work in earlier films, Ocean's Eleven (2001), Traffic (2000), and Boogie Nights (1997). However, nothing had prepared me for his two 2004 movies, which I just got around to seeing, Hotel Rwanda and Crash. In the former, he gave a wrenching performance, especially a scene in which he is trying to tie his tie after driving down a road littered with victims of the Rwandan genocide, which was absolutely astounding. Crash, of course, won the Oscar for best picture, and he gave the same kind of polished and emotionally underplayed but nonetheless devastating performance.
If you want to help the kids in Uganda, a group called World Vision allows you to pledge a monthly amount to help run some camps they set up that the kids can "hide" at and be taken care of at.
ReplyDelete...and make sure to turn those little brown heathens into good, upstanding Christian kids. A stand-up job, indeed, saving their little souls in the process. Where did I put my checkbook?!
ReplyDelete