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What These Former 'Lost Boys' of Sudan Went Through Before Coming to America Will Leave You Speechless
Ger Duany Emmanuel Jal, stars of the new movie 'The Good Lie' alongside Reese Witherspoon, speak on Glenn Beck's radio program October 1, 2014. (Photo: TheBlaze TV)

What These Former 'Lost Boys' of Sudan Went Through Before Coming to America Will Leave You Speechless

Stars of the new movie "The Good Lie" starring Reese Witherspoon

Glenn Beck on Wednesday urged everyone to go see the new movie "The Good Lie" starring Reese Witherspoon.

"You need to bring your family, your friends, your kids," he said on his radio program. "I'm bringing my family to the movie theater on Friday night to see this movie. It is tremendous. And probably, I think, the most important movie at the right time for America."

The story centers around "the lost boys" of Sudan, who were orphaned by civil war before coming to the United States in the 1990s. You can see the trailer, below:

Beck spoke with two of the actors from the film, Ger Duany and Emmanuel Jal, both of whom had similar upbringings as their characters.

"You were in the Sudan, and you were taken and forced to fight as child soldiers, right?" Beck asked the two.

"We all have experienced [it] differently," Jal said. "All my aunts died in the war, including my mom, and later to learn my uncles -- only two that I know are alive. "And so the way you look at it, it's like hell. We have experienced hell on earth. Sometimes you ask yourself questions if, when we're kids, if this is not hell, where is the other hell? ... When the bombs dropped -- rained in my village and seeing everything being taken away from me, I thought that was hell. And all through our lives, you see six, seven years old, burying their own dead."

"One of the lowest point I ever had was when I was tempted to eat my friend when we ran out of food," Jal admitted. "My friend was dying. And I told him, 'I'm going to eat you tomorrow.' But I remember what my mother used to do. She came from the church. She used to pray. So I prayed to my mother's God, and I say, 'God, if you can give me something to eat today, one day when I survive, I'm going to give the testimony and give the credit to you.' So if you look at the movie, the Bible is a star in its own right."

Despite the horrific experiences the actors had, they agreed that the movie is meant to be uplifting.

"For people who have faith, you will see what faith can do," Jal said. "Because faith is the substance of the things hoped for and evidence of the unseen."

"It is. And yet it's not jammed down anybody's throat," Beck said. "I mean, it's very subtly done and beautifully done, but it is the rock that you tie yourself to. Can I ask what happened, you found food the next day?"

Ger Duany Emmanuel Jal, stars of the new movie 'The Good Lie' alongside Reese Witherspoon, speak on Glenn Beck's radio program October 1, 2014. (Photo: TheBlaze TV) Ger Duany Emmanuel Jal, stars of the new movie 'The Good Lie' alongside Reese Witherspoon, speak on Glenn Beck's radio program October 1, 2014. (Photo: TheBlaze TV)

"What happened is when I prayed -- because cannibalism had started. We're eating snails, vultures. We ran out of food, and we're a group of two to 400 young people. We plan an escape. In the end, only 16 people survived," he said. "And a crow was the one that answered my prayer, that became the block to prevent me from eating my friend."

Beck said: "When you guys got here after everything that you saw -- this is the part of the movie that really was exceptionally hard for me, because you love your characters by the time you get to America. ... And then you come here and Reese Witherspoon shows up, and you immediately dislike her because she has no concept and she doesn't care. No one can relate, in our arrogance."

"When you really came over as lost boys, what was your experience like?" Beck asked.

Duany responded: "When I came here in 1994, we came here to the Lutheran church. And we were the first group of guys before everybody knew about the lost boys of Sudan. They just knew we were a political refugees who came to this part of the world. So we didn't know anything. Everything was learning from the very beginning. ... We just had to turn to each other and find strength like those guys did in the movie."

Jal added that toilets, in particular, fascinated him when he first arrived.

"I was wondering when somebody download a file, how that machine takes everything away in front of you. And then clean water comes!" he said with a laugh. "I used to think probably a snake would come out. So when I'm using it, I have to stand, hoping that when I download the file, a snake wouldn't bite me."

Jal added that when he first came to America, he frequently read the Bible and watched movies about aliens.

"I was in shock at the cathedrals, the big buildings, the bridges, the train system, and everything, and in my head, I kind of like concluded and said, 'Probably white people are the fallen angels, or maybe they are aliens,'" he said with a laugh. "It took me a while to actually know that these people are normal human beings."

"I could go on and on," he continued. "The life we are living now, we've been transformed. I mean, we come from a situation where we're starving at one point. Now, we have plenty to eat. At one time, I was trying to tell kids that I am in a place where I choose to eat one meal a day. And the kids tell me, 'What do you mean...?' I told them, in this place, people die of fatness. And one kid said, 'Wow, that's the coolest death ever!'"

"We're in a dream," Jal concluded. "We can't actually believe it. We don't even know how to thank God because we've been transformed. The way you look at it, we came from the bottom like lobsters, and now we're rolling at the top like rock stars, you know."

Complimentary Clip from TheBlaze TV

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