Christopher Quinn is a journalist. He speaks like a journalist, and while promoting his film, “God Grew Tired of Us,” Quinn, like any journalist, has a dozen things to say at any given time and isn’t always sure how to phrase them.

Born in Washington, D.C., Quinn studied documentary filmmaking in New Mexico. It was difficult finding a program, he says, because “there were programs at some of the larger institutions but they seemed to be a little less complete.”

After doing some research, he found a school in Santa Fe called the Anthropology Film Center. “We ended up putting in about 40 hours a week for a year on documentary filmmaking,” he says.

Why documentaries? “I was always interested in journalism,” he says, “and I wanted to do something visual.” A long-form documentary, he says, “was the most complete way of delivering something that was happening in the world, having an hour and a half to work, as opposed five minutes for the evening newscast.”

Quinn spent five and a half years working on “God Grew Tired of Us” – out on DVD on Tuesday (Aug. 14) – which he began partly as a reaction to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.

“At the time I was stunned at the West’s general response to Rwanda, which happened very quickly and no one did anything,” he says. “The same happened in Sierra Leone.” From 1991 to 2002, thousands of people died in Sierra Leone, and more than two million – one-third of the population – were displaced. “I just felt that all these things were taking place in Africa and no one was really noticing, myself included, so I started to really dig in and look at it.”

The pivotal moment came when he began researching Sudan.

“I was amazed that there was a 20-year war that had caused two million people to die and four and a half million to be displaced,” Quinn says. “I just couldn’t get my head around it. I read this story about the Lost Boys, and from that moment I knew I was going to make a documentary on them. It was a smaller group, but with that group came these larger universal problems, and their story is so compelling, how they carried on to survive.”

In case you’re wondering how he secured funding, he didn’t. “I believe financially we were up and down the whole way through,” he says. “You kind of fundraise, go back and shoot, fundraise, go back and shoot, and along the way there were a number of people that kind of came into the project.”

Quinn went to his high school friend, actor Dermot Mulroney (”My Best Friend’s Wedding”), who at the time was married to Catherine Keener (best known for “Being John Malkovich” and “The 40-Year-Old Virgin”), and the pair looked at the movie.

“It was a three, I guess a three-hour cut, really long and malformed,” Quinn says. “They really liked it, and wanted to help any way they could.”

At the time Keener was working on “The Interpreter,” and suggested Nicole Kidman for the narration. She and Mulroney also sent Brad Pitt a copy of the film.

“Brad came in when I was at a difficult place financially,” Quinn says. “We were in the process of editing and really needed some money. There were not a lot of takers for a film about Africa back then, it wasn’t on the broadcast radar. It was just something that didn’t seem to be interesting people, so it looked very grim.

“I went out and met with [Pitt], and talked about how the project was going to be able to continue on if we’d get help, and he came in and helped us, and lent his name also so that I could go back and get the rest of it financed.

“It was a very friendly kind of process,” Quinn says, “sans agents or the usual way that you go through it. “It was just a very friendly thing, and I think everyone including Catherine and Dermot and Brad and Nicole, they all felt that it was an important story that needed to get out.”

Filming started in July of 2001. Quinn had been doing research since March 2001 before he discovered his crew only had a short period of time before a group of Lost Boys made the transatlantic journey to America in August.

“We had to be up and running very quickly,” he says. “And so we raised some money, got a production company in New York to help underwrite the process, and then we ended up on the border of Kenya and Sudan and just started to film.”

Quinn and his crew, which consisted of two producers, a cameraman, a sound man, and a still photographer, were given support by the UN, which helped them make their way through the camp and hosted them while they were in the Kokuma refugee camp in Kenya. They started filming in Africa, made the transatlantic journey along with their subjects, and then did a large portion in the U.S., especially “the early days when they first got here and there was that discovery period,” Quinn says.

They would go back to Syracuse and Philadelphia, where their subjects had settled, and film when they could financially, and also when certain events took place.

“I was constantly on the phone with them,” Quinn says. “I was in New York, and Panther [Bior, one of the film's three subjects] and Daniel [Pach] were in Pittsburgh, and then John [Bul Dau] was up in Syracuse, and we would go and film when they first got their first job, when they started to work, when they first got into school, that sort of stuff. We followed the benchmarks of when they were coming to America and these steps they were taking in the process of immigrating into the new culture and at the same time gauging what was happening to their own culture.”

Quinn ended up with more than 200 hours of footage, which he whittled down to 86 minutes.

“We did a number of test screenings,” he says, “and the longer the cut… the first time we showed the film, there were people who said, ‘it’s great material, but it’s really, really long.’ And ultimately I think it’s very important to listen to what people have to say. We wanted to show the film and have it out there and available, and to tell a story that could go on for, you could make it three hours, you could make it five hours, it’s worthy of all that time. Unfortunately people go to the theatres and watch an hour and a half film, and that really dictates a great deal.”

Quinn hopes that people seek out more information about the topic after seeing his film. (The movie’s web site, godgrewtiredofus.com, is very good at pointing viewers in that direction.)

“It’s kind of an opening to what’s taking place in Sudan and to a larger degree what’s taking place in Africa,” he says. “Its purpose was to really show not only the story of the Lost Boys but also kind of the enormous things that are taking place in the world, like in our day, what I consider a modern-day genocide, in which other people are systematically eradicated.”






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