Sorry not much of a summary, but if you're reading this you'd know the summary anyway. I saw this in a plane coming back home and miraculously saw the end as the plane touched the tarmac! The story also touched my inner self tarmac and I went through a lot of emotions - Trying to associate myself with such a situation was simply futile, just like the dedicated American workers who could just not imagines what these refugees had been through. Imagine isn't even close as similar situations can't be imagined in their reality. Yes we can write about them, have our own feelings and reactions about them. But we can't have the same trauma about them. Like many other situations it needs to be lived, and perhaps it's a good thing as one would not want to have to live all the distressing situations that may affect us. The movie delves into it when it shows characters re-living their ordeal in their thoughts and also the blank or incredulous faces of those who hear about it from the would be 'horses mouth'. I remember a long time ago watching at the cinema Private Ryan. Comfortably seated very close to the screen looking at the beach where I was bombarded with close up of many soldiers 'erased' for ever by machine guns and other weapons.... I guess some are affected by such scenes in a positive and active way but I'm pretty sure the majority of us live the cinema to go on about our own life. "hey it was a good movie, wasn't it". Yes for me I liked this story very much and did not need to know it was inspired by real events...Reality is all around us every day, like my recent trip to Tokyo looking at tarpaulin covering stuff under some bridge, then being told that people were trying to live underneath! I read one of the early comments that recommends to take the youngsters with you to see this movies...Youngsters play games where one shoots 'peoples' with super machine guns, or dismember them with powerful chainsaws and other form of weapons for entertainment! What difference would it make to them. But what difference did it make to me? "life is a lottery" is my deduction.

A movie to remember. This movie is a unique movie in terms of depicting:1. Death is not just a concept! 2. How children in Africa are feeling it early on. 3. Makes good contrast with western world 4. Reminder that America and most American people are a sympathetic and awesome nation.It has probably not received the attention it deserves, because of budget restriction, and the lack of population's attention catcher!! but still a great movie. Nicely and realistically played by actors and actress, with smart dialogues, contrasting western world and third world. Highly recommended.

This film did not have a theatre release here in my country, it came out on DVD today. I had seen the trailer and was looking forward to it. I had read several comments criticising the film for being about white people heroically and selflessly saving the black people. Even the IMDb web page says "their encounter with an employment agency counsellor forever changes all of their lives." Reese Witherspoon is the star attraction so people will notice the film, but she is not the main character of the story, her's is a supporting role, which she does well. If anything the encounter with the Sudanese refugees changes her character's life forever. On an emotional level the film is deeply affecting. The employment agency agent or the charity representative would have had more depth and connection if one or the other was played by an American woman of African descent. There is a tribal link between white Americans and Sudanese people but it is so far back as to be far beyond the longest oral tradition. I guess it was contrast rather than convergence the film maker wanted- their choice.The brutality of the war in Sudan is not graphically portrayed as violence often is in modern films. Graphic violence has a tendency to shut down the viewers empathy- a defensive measure I suppose. Without plastic guts and synthetic gore to be shocked at and to immunise us from the pain of others, the viewer starts to care about the family and their ordeal. I started seriously leaking water at one point, and kept springing leaks at numerous points thereafter. As a male, I do this very very rarely, and watching films, at most brim a bit, I never ever suffer rivulets down cheeks until now. I needed tissues. Tissues! The fish out of water comedy was gentle and the characters were not made out as ignorant or gullible, but eager and quick to learn. What they have to learn from first world culture is superficial however, just like the culture. More important is what they have to teach us first worlders. But to learn first you have to acknowledge there is something you can learn from uneducated poor people from a third world country. I think the film makers did just that.

A lot of stories based on real-life stories don't feel like real life. They feel like a story reborn within a storyteller's imagination to make it somehow more appealing, a better package. Not "The Good Lie." It feels real. And it engenders real emotion. If you can watch this movie and not laugh and feel warm at the heartwarming parts — as we do in real life — and cry at the heartbreaking moments, then you're not watching. You're texting or having a conversation, or thinking about what you're going to do this weekend. If you give yourself over to this film, it will absolutely pull you inside, wrap itself around you and touch your heart. You will laugh. And yes, you will cry. This story puts a very human face on a very human tragedy, that otherwise we might too often look at simply as a headline on an inside page of the newspaper that we pass over to get to something that isn't so hard to fathom.I applaud the people who made this film and thank them. Any filmmaker on the planet would be proud to have been associated with this. I know I would be, and all I am is a guy who stumbled upon it on HBO. What a find.