Inspired to act
An after-school meeting between a Hersey High School teacher and a Rolling Meadows graduate student working the custodial shift changed both lives forever.
The custodian, Brian Burns, had stopped to talk with social studies teacher Bruce Janu about a group Janu sponsors called Teens Against Genocide.
Burns has been to Sudan and the discussion the two had that day about the horrific genocide there resulted in a full-length documentary now drawing rave reviews at film festivals across the country.
"Facing Sudan" will be shown at 5:30 p.m. Sunday at the Illinois International Film Festival at the Arcada Theater in St. Charles.
Burns is featured at the beginning and end of the film going about his custodial duties. His menial tasks underscore the film's premise: that ordinary people can do extraordinary things, even in Sudan.
"He's the one that inspired the film," says Janu, who moonlights as a filmmaker and runs Bell, Book & Camera Productions. "He had this tremendous story to tell."
Burns visited Sudan twice, after he first met a Sudan native at Taylor University. But it was a set of compelling pictures featured in a brochure published by Safe Harbor International Relief that first planted the seed, he says.
He now hopes that seeing the pictures in the documentary will motivate others to act.
"I hope it stirs other people's passions for these needy people, whose lives have been shattered," Burns says. "Those pictures sparked my interest and sent me in a direction that changed my life."
He also points to pictures featured in the documentary drawn by children who fled the genocide in Darfur, and were treated in a refugee camp. The pictures are haunting, depicting violence and suffering the children witnessed.
"That's my favorite part of the film," Burns says.
Next week, Burns begins a class to learn Arabic at the University of Chicago. Arabic is one of the languages spoken in Sudan, which he hopes will help him in his quest to work for a relief organization in providing aid to the people living in the country.
Others like him are featured including Jackie Kraus of Arlington Heights and Martha Cook, a Barrington woman who went to Sudan and brought back photos from a refugee camp. She's got photos of relatives of one of the Lost Boys profiled in the film; as well as a pediatrician from New Jersey and a high school student.
Janu only finished filming this summer. He cautiously hoped for the documentary to be accepted into at least one film festival. At last count, it's been accepted into 18, and recently won best documentary feature at the Landlocked Film Festival in Iowa City last month.
Next month it's up for best international documentary at the Rome International Film Festival in Georgia.
Janu says the final aspect of filming was the hardest: to create the ending, or the film's lasting images. He tossed around the idea of including some animation or recreating scenes with local actors but in the end he went with a montage of photos.
He gathered pictures, interviews and voice-overs of ordinary people and spliced them together with footage from a giant rally to "Stop Genocide" held last year in Washington, D.C.
Accompanying the visuals is an original song written by song writer Tom Flannery, which in Janu's opinion just makes it. The song is called, "There Must Be Something I Can Do."
For more information about the documentary, visit facingsudan.com.