'The Good Lie' treads close to Sudanese refugee life, Minnesota actress says
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The civil war in South Sudan is a long way from here, but one Minnesota actor hopes her new film will bring some local understanding of the conflict.
Kuoth Wiel is one of the stars in "The Good Lie." It tells the story of the refugees who became known as the Lost Boys of Sudan, and opens in Minnesota this weekend.
Wiel is remarkably poised, given what she has been through. She tells the story of how she heard about a casting call for a movie, looking for young Sudanese actors. She had done some school plays, but that was about it. A student at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, she sent in an application, and was surprised after auditioning when she got a call from the casting director.
"She said 'OK, we pick you. You are going to have to leave your life and quit school.' I was like 'OK!'" Wiel said with a laugh. "I was a little taken aback!"
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Soon she found herself in Atlanta with Oscar-winning actor Reese Witherspoon and the rest of the cast and crew of "The Good Lie." Ahead lay months of production, including a trip to South Africa, and locations around the U.S.
Upheaval is nothing new to Wiel. She was born in a refugee camp in Ethiopia. Her parents were UN relief workers, who moved back and forward to Sudan. She speaks in a very matter-of-fact about what happened to her family.
"I lost my father to the war in Sudan," she said.
Weil was 5 years old when he was killed. Her mother raised her in a refugee camp, along with a brother, but he joined thousands of others displaced by the conflict who tried to walk to safety to neighboring countries.
"He walked. I think he went to Ethiopia, walked back to back to Sudan, and walked back, went to Kenya," she said. "That's how he emigrated to the U.S., through Kenya."
That walk was close to a thousand miles. Many died along the way.
Wiel and her mother came to the U.S. later and settled in Minnesota.
"I immigrated into the U.S. in 1998, when I was about 8 years old," she said. "And I have lived in Faribault ever since."
Wiel didn't leap blindly at the chance to be in "The Good Lie." She read Margaret Nagle's script and the story impressed her. It was well researched and based on interviews with hundreds of Sudanese refugees. Wiel said the writing was so good that she initially believed Nagle was Sudanese herself.
"Very accurate of my culture," she said. "And very representative. But the story itself was something new and I had never seen it before."
"The Good Lie" follows the four friends who become a family after their real families are torn apart by war. They escape to a refugee camp, but then have to wait 13 years to get a visa to come to the U.S. But even in America they can't escape the trauma of the past.
Their anguish is heightened when immigration officials send their sister, Abital, played by Wiel, to a city hundreds of miles away.
All of the main African characters were played by Sudanese actors. All of them were refugees and two of whom were forced to become child soldiers during the civil war. Weil said the actors, rather like the characters they play, quickly became like another family.
"We were all somehow effected by war," she said.
"The Good Lie" depicts not only the horrors of the conflict, but the confusion of arriving in America: the new food, a new climate, even just learning to answer a phone.
Witherspoon, the film's star, plays a well-meaning employment counselor. But it's Wiel and the other Sudanese actors who are front and center in much of the film.
Wiel praises Hollywood for telling more African stories. But she said attending the premier at the Toronto Film Festival was surreal, particularly when the audience rose and gave the film a standing ovation.
"I think that just validated all the struggles we had went through, the hard work we had done. But also for my story and the Sudanese story to be shown to the world because we had thought this was never going to be possible, in our lifetime," Wiel said.
She's now graduated from Augsburg and hopes to work with Sudanese refugees in the future. But Wiel is also looking to see if there might be a future in acting, as "The Good Lie" hits movie screens around the world.
