Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service

The African Studies Program at SFS and the Georgetown University Lecture Fund recently hosted BSFS alumnus C. Karim Chrobog and his award-winning film War Child, the story of Emmanuel Jal, a former child soldier and “lost boy” of Sudan, who became an international hip-hop star with his message of peace and hope for his home country.

After being orphaned at a young age, Jal became a refugee and a member of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which fought against the Arab militias of Sudan’s north. Jal eventually deserted the SPLA and found his way to the UK, where he began to use music to raise awareness of the ongoing civil war in Sudan and the global problem of child soldiers. Over the course of the film, Jal returns to Sudan to visit family members, UN refugee camps, and past battlefields and tries to come to terms with his experience. Today, he continues to use music to spread his message. Jal’s story has been featured in Time magazine, USA Today, the Times of London, The Guardian, the Washington Post, CNN, Fox, Voice of America, BBC, MTV, and SkyNews, amongst other media outlets.

War Child was an official selection of the 2008 Berlin, Edinburgh, Seattle, Montreal, Silverdocs, and Helsinki international film festivals, and won the prestigious audience choice award at the 2008 Tribeca International Film Festival, among other accolades. For more information on Emmanuel Jal and the film, please visit www.warchildmovie.com.

C. Karim Chrobog graduated from BSFS, where he was the business manager of the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs. He is fluent in German and Arabic. Tangier Pictures, an independent company which Chrobog founded in 2005, is currently developing a film on the 14th century Moroccan explorer Ibn Battuta as well as a documentary called Kidnapped, which tells the story of the Chrobog family's kidnapping during a vacation gone awry in the South of Yemen in 2005.