Endless eye is in development for Lost Boy Library. The story of Justin Machien Luoi, a Southern Sudanese man who was educated in the US as a refugee, and his ambitions to return home to build a library with hopes of helping the community as well as the entire country. Endless Eye is working in conjunction with Panyijiar Community Development Services in a cross-promotional effort not only to see that the Library gets built in Panyijiar, but also that long-term stability and infrastructure can be delivered to the communites of Southern Sudan.

Justin Machien was a Lost Boy who came to America at a young age after walking through Kenya on foot with 27,000 other young men. A large number of these boys were relocated through Lutheran Social Services to Fargo, ND, where Machien graduated from high school and college in just three years time each. During that time he was working the night-shift at Walmart and managed to save money in between school, soccer, work, and being President of the Sudanese Society of North Dakota.
After ten years, while Justin was still in high school, he returned to Sudan and managed to find his mother who he had presumed dead. It was during this visit that Justin got married to a girl he had met in Kenya and began giving speeches to large gatherings and the village elders about the Library. He left for the United States with his heart torn. He wanted to start building on the project immediately and didn't want to leave his family, but he also knew that he could make the money he needed in the States.
Justin recently moved to Grand Forks to attend graduate school in Public Administration at UND. During this time he meets regularly with PACODES, an NPO he initiated to raise money and awareness for the project. We will follow Justin largely from this stage on, as he aims to finish school, fund-raise and find his way back to Sudan. Once in Sudan, the remainder of the Doc is more straight forward, the narrative may open up here more to tell the lives of the individuals of the community Justin aims to build in, and see the process as it takes off and comes to completion.
Beyond Justin and the individuals committed to seeing the Library Project to its success, the Books themselves that are raised around the country become their own character in the film. We follow a specific book donated from the hands of one young man, as it reaches the hands of a young Sudanese girl. Their physical presence, the labor it will take to ship them overseas, the visual of rows and rows of trucks carrying books through the middle American plains is a stimulating one, as well as considering what the deeper importance of the Library itself. The Library represents the potential of Knowledge, or growth, in the same way as the seed.
So while we intend to follow Justin around like a typical first person doc, we will also aim to include a highly stylized omniscent perspective that highlights the interconnectedness it takes to accomplish a task this big. From the living rooms of individual donors across the globe, to the ignorant student in an 8th grade class that doesn't know where Sudan is, making a wide-ranged National movement and implicating this on film will be an important and monumental task.
This will also be achieved by filming our own fundraising efforts, our mysteriously stylized poster-campaign depicting the Lost Boys in front of stacks and stacks of books, peoples reactions, in Chicago and North Dakota, to the grass roots movement. And lastly, there will be an element of a Wes Anderson Narrative feature, by periodically embracing the vibrant, subtleties and quirkiness of humanity that is both at once endearing, funny and terrifying, but always remarkably human. Parring our protoganist's subjective journey, and the collective awareness raised, with beauty shots, time lapse, and poetical images of what knowledge is, how power is distributed, and how we relate to the cultural other, we will have our essential approach.
Alternative camera rigs will also be embraced. Aside from a typical dolly, pan, and tilt, we will be wiring camera rigs along zip lines for longer, sweeping, existentially gorgeous shots that allow us to traverse space with utter precision, fulfilling our ambitions of both the importance of global awareness and the intimacy of individual concern. Aside from zip lines, kite-cams, balloon rigs, modified steadicam rigs and car-mounts will be used for optimal motion control.
Intended Audience for this film will be kids between the ages of 18 - 28. Embracing an MTV paced, highly stylized doc-feel that branches far into the highly appealing narrative world, we will procure our interest among a primarily younger male audience, while retaining the attention of most mid-thirty-year-olds due to the primary importance of the issue. At the same time, this video will be primarily used as a fund-raising tool for future development, with the idea that over the course of filming the feature, other peoples stories may be captured in short doc story format, to be incorporated on the web for viral video and cross promotion. This will also be used as an educational tool to be screened at schools, on PBS as a feature spot for the P.O.V. series and hopefully for eventual theatrical release as well. Its candidacy for the festival circuit being further legitimized by the success of other such first person films as Iraq in Fragments and Jesus Camp.
Aside from aligning with PBS for a feature spot on their P.O.V. series, most funding sources in the initial money-making moments of the film will be obtained through grants such as the Ford foundation, MacArthur Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and potentially Sundance. Primarily, however we intend to create a largely grassroots movement through Endless Eye NPO that associates a separate functioning body of the NPO for Southern Sudanese Development Planning and Humanitarian Relief with the Sudan Awareness Movement. Continuing to create Socially Informative Media from the area that builds a movement beyond this individual feature-length film by combining multiple narratives to help paint the psychological atmosphere, while on the home-front being powered by a highly motivated staff of 10 to 20 individuals.
These coordinators would be responsible for all other logistical and promotional issues related to the image, the cause, and the people. Beginning with our Poster drive that is linked to a Dollar Drive and a Book Drive amongst College Campuses starting in Chicago and moving out through the country, we will throw events and screen films and promote functions to raise awareness and funds.
After the film is completed, a Grassroots guerilla marketing campaign will be employed alongside the events, viral videos, blogging, and screenings. We will release the film ourselves, or through PBS but forging a deal in such an instance, where the DVD would cost 6 dollars with an implied donation on top of this that remains optional. Money would go directly back to Southern Sudan to improve living conditions and a small portion of DVD sales would return to Endless Eye NPO for cost-covering and organization expansion.