Rebuilding Hope

2009/US/78mins/ Dir. Jen Marlowe

As small children, Gabriel Bol Deng, Koor Garang and Garang Mayuol fled their villages in South Sudan due to civil war. They became a part of a group of thousands of other boys with a similar story, nicknamed “The Lost Boys” upon resettlement in the USA in 2001.

In May 2007, Gabriel Bol, Koor, and Garang, now in their twenties, embarked on a journey back to Sudan to discover whether their homes and families had survived, what the current situation is in South Sudan, and how they can help their community rebuild after devastating civil war.

Along the way, the young men assessed the hopes, dreams and fears of the Southern Sudanese people nearly three years after the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. They explored the connections between the conflict in South Sudan to the conflict in Darfur, probing the larger questions of identity and ethnicity in Sudan.

Rebuilding Hope is a powerful record of Gabriel Bol, Koor and Garang’s quest to find surviving family-members and rediscover and contribute to their homeland; it also sheds light on what the future holds for South Sudan in its precarious struggle for peace, development and stability.