By BRITTNEY SCHUESSLER
J Alumni News staff
Natalia Ledford (second from right) poses with some of the Sudanese people who appear in documentary.
When Natalia Ledford decides to do something, she doesn’t let anything stop her.
In middle school she played football. “I’ve always had this weird thing where I like to prove people wrong,” Ledford said. “When people said, ‘Girls can’t do that,’ it fueled me.”
At 19, Ledford produced a documentary about Sudanese refugees titled “Paths of the Displaced.” It debuted in September at the Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center in Lincoln.
“I couldn’t believe the turnout,” Ledford said. “The theater was full and then some. We had to bring in extra chairs, which was very moving to me because I think it showed that people in Lincoln really care about the issues affecting the refugee community or at least want to learn more about them.”
Ledford had stumbled upon this powerful story in high school.
Her documentary is intimate, inspiring and has the potential to affect anyone who sees it.
“Paths of the Displaced” is about Sudanese refugees who attended high school with Ledford in Lincoln. The teenage refugees carry the weight of the world on their shoulders with smiles on their faces.
Teen moviemaker learns perseverance early
It’s no wonder Ledford had the resolve as a teenager to produce a documentary: She’s been determined her entire life.
Ledford said her family raised her to be a Husker fan, and she played football for love of the sport. In high school, she ran cross country and was on the swim team.
Now, Ledford is more focused on education than sports. As a sophomore at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, she wants to learn about the world.
Her curiosity about social issues and Africa surfaced early.
Many refugees settle in Lincoln
Ledford became editor-in-chief of the Lincoln High Advocate her sophomore year.
At the paper, she learned that Lincoln had become an official refugee resettlement about 20 years ago because of its low crime rate.
Lincoln has resettled almost 5,500 refugees since 1983. Half of Nebraska’s refugees for the past 18 years have lived in Lincoln, according to UNL Extension in Lancaster County. And Lincoln High was an attractive school for refugees because of its highly developed English Language Learners program.
During Ledford’s junior year, she decided to do a story on the issues in Darfur.
A teacher directed her to fellow student, Musa Kishieb. She sat down with him planning to just ask him basic historical questions. “I didn’t realize that he had been through the war,” she said. “It totally caught me off guard.”
Kishieb grew up in the mountains during a time of war. After his father was killed, he and his pregnant mom fled. They walked for months, barefoot, before ending up in Egypt, and eventually, Lincoln.
Ledford soon realized Kishieb wasn’t the only one with a story to tell. Other students from the Sudan were at Lincoln High, too.
“They knocked me off my feet with their stories, and I really started to see things differently.” She interviewed Guuma Ayaj, Monica Geng, Kuol Kuol and Kuek Aleu, all Lincoln High students at the time. She also interviewed Bounis Charles, who did not attend Lincoln High.
Instead of going to the movies or the mall after school, Ledford said, “I’d come home from interviews in tears.”
Ledford's documentary screened at The Ross.
TV tour leads to documentary idea
One day, Ledford went to NET Television for a tour of the network’s facility. That’s when the idea of a documentary began to gel.
Michael Farrell, the television production manager for NET Television, said, “She approached us very early on, and I immediately thought, ‘OK, let’s find out what this is all about.’”
Farrell listened to Ledford describe the story she was writing for her school paper. “She had a good story,” he said. “And it’s refreshing to meet a young person who has such empathy for other people.”
Farrell arranged for Ledford, who was still in high school, to be a visiting student at UNL. He helped her get access to editing programs and equipment. She had borrowed a camera and lighting equipment from her dad.
“I just became so obsessed with the project that I’d work on it right after school till I went to bed,” Ledford said.
Ledford said part of the documentary deals with the refugees’ past and what had happened to them in Sudan. The rest focuses on how they’ve coped in the United States. “Their lives are so different than most American teenagers,” Ledford said. “They have an outstanding array of responsibilities, and they’ve overcome all these things.”
Film aims to increase awareness
Ledford narrates the documentary, which she hopes will make people in Lincoln more aware of refugee life.
Kishieb thinks of Ledford as a heroine for telling his story. “I just want to let my American friends know where I came from. There are innocent black people who are suffering — murder, rape, torture, underground mines and airplane bombings every single day,” he said. “People there are in desperate need of medicine, food, clean water, schools and sanitary facilities.”
What makes the documentary unusual for UNL is that Kishieb, Geng and Kuol are all students and employees at the university. They work at Selleck Residence Hall. Ayaj worked at Selleck during filming but has since moved to Grand Island.
Ledford said because most of the students learned English faster than their parents, they take responsibility for supporting their families. “All of them contribute to their families’ financial stability in some way,” she said.
“They were not even able to go to school in Africa because of the war and poverty. Some of them stepped foot in school for the first time in the U.S.”
Farrell said Ledford did a good job of letting the subjects tell the story themselves. “I would never try to tell Natalia what to do,” he said. “I would only offer suggestions. The film is very much her own. It’s a very good piece of work for even a graduating senior.”
Ledford, through former Dean Will Norton Jr., was able to get 30 minutes of raw footage from Norton’s acquaintance, African filmmaker Salim Amin at no cost. Also through networking, she also obtained 1,000 free pictures from photographer Blazej Mijula for the project.
Project leads to scholarship for filmmaker
Ledford’s hard work paid off. Her work on the documentary made her one of 102 high school journalism students from across the nation eligible for the Al Neuharth Free Spirit Journalism scholarship. In March 2008, she was awarded one of two $50,000 scholarships at a banquet in Washington, D.C.
Before Ledford left for D.C., she told the subjects of the documentary that she was going to be able to meet “all these prestigious people.” They asked her to take letters they had written with her to publicize the plight of Sudanese people. Ledford described the letters as “the most heart-breaking letters you could ever read in your life.”
She waited all week for the appropriate time to give the letters to Neuharth, the founder of USA Today. She passed them to him when she went up to receive her award. For her acceptance speech, Ledford read a letter written by Ayaj.
Today, Ledford is studying journalism at UNL and plans to go to Rwanda in 2010, which she says has always been a dream.
Ledford’s advice to other people with big dreams: “Don’t look at the huge picture and try to seize it all at once. Little by little, build on it. Really amazing things can happen because you never know how many building blocks you can put on top of one idea.”
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