Reese Witherspoon draws a crowd at the premiere of The Good Lie

Reese Witherspoon draws a crowd at the premiere of The Good Lie

Reese Witherspoon. (Image: Giordano Ciampini)

The always-adorable Reese Witherspoon reeled in big crowds outside of the Elgin Theatre on Sunday afternoon for the red carpet opening of The Good Lie—the first of two films she’s premiering at the festival. Quebecois director Philipe Falardeau’s follow-up to his Oscar-nominated Monsieur Lazhar, The Good Lie is the story of a group of Sudanese civil-war survivors who win a lottery for refuge in the United States. Carrie, played by Witherspoon, is charged with helping them settle into their new strange home. Sudan’s “lost boys”—the group of 20,000 or so Sudanese boys displaced by the country’s twenty-year-long conflict—is a subject Falardeau told reporters had haunted him since he visited the country as a documentary cameraman in the early ’90s. On the carpet, Witherspoon gushed about her recent work with Canadian directors (last year: Atom Egoyan, this year: Falardeau and Jean-Marc Vallée). While everyone was busy fawning over her, though, House of CardsCorey Stoll and the handsome troupe that played the Sudanese refugees—Arnold OcengGer DuanyEmmanuel Jal, and Kuoth Wiel (the latter three of whom were actually, in real life, displaced by the Sudanese civil war)—walked right by.