EIU honors Hersey teacher and documentary filmmaker
Hersey High School teacher Bruce Janu has won awards from national film festivals for his documentaries about Darfur. Next week, he will receive an award recognizing his entire body of work, as a filmmaker and an educator.
Janu has been named one of 13 Outstanding Graduate Alumni of Eastern Illinois University. He will receive the award at a recognition dinner on the Charleston campus hosted by the Dean of the Graduate School and the Graduate Alumni Advisory Board.
"It's completely unexpected," says Janu, a Cary resident who graduated in 1986 from Hersey, before earning undergraduate and graduate degrees at EIU.
"Although I've been pretty involved at Eastern over the last year or so," he adds, "I never saw this coming."
In 2008, Janu was invited to deliver the keynote address at the university's History Teacher's Conference. He returned last fall to screen his latest documentary on campus, "Crayons and Paper," before taking it to international film festivals.
In the film, he follows Dr. Jerry Erlich, who he introduced in his first film. The New Jersey-based pediatrician volunteers with Doctors Without Borders, and as part of his rounds in Sudan and Sri Lanka, brings crayons and paper for the children he treats to express themselves.
Erlich has hundreds of these pictures, Janu says, which provide powerful visuals of the violence in the region and its affect on children and families: Helicopters attacking villages; houses on fire; armed troops burning homes and shooting children.
"Paper and Crayons" wraps up its film festival run this weekend at the SENE Film, Music and Arts Festival in Providence, R.I., after garnering an honorable mention at a "Making a Difference" film festival in Toronto.
"At the moment, it's being sent out to distributors and networks to generate some interest in broadcast possibilities," Janu adds. "At the very least, I'd love to have a cable run with the film."
Janu earned two "Best Documentary" awards for his 2007 film, "Facing Sudan."
He undertook the project after a Hersey maintenance worker walked into his classroom after hours and began telling him about the atrocities he had witnessed in Sudan.
What started out as a short classroom video for his history class turned into a feature-length documentary after Janu began meeting other people who had firsthand accounts from Darfur.
The film and its success have drawn Janu an improbable run on the speakers' circuit, something he says he never would have expected back in his days as a Hersey student where his world revolved around the theater productions.
"It's strange, when I talk to people about Darfur, it's like I wear two hats," Janu says. "For me, I am just a teacher who just happened to make a couple of films about Darfur. But when I go out to speak, people don't see me as that. To them, I am a filmmaker."