Going the distance on a global run

About nine years ago, a Swiss couple named Serge and Nicole Roetheli had a novel idea. What if they sold all their possessions, quit their jobs, said goodbye to their friends and families, including Serge's two kids, and ran across the world?

Apparently finding no compelling reason to stay home, they went ahead with it, although technically it was Serge who did the running - more than 25,000 miles - and Nicole who followed on a Yamaha motorcycle towing a small trailer packed with what few possessions they had left, and a video camera. The trip, which started in February 2000, took five years to complete. They covered 25,400 miles, with Serge running the equivalent of one marathon four days a week. They traveled in Morocco, the Sahara Desert, South Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, South America, the United States, and Canada.

Nicole filmed the trip they call their "small but grand adventure," and their film, "Beyond the Epic Run" will be screened tomorrow at the Regent Theatre in Arlington. It's one of 14 screenings taking place in major running communities across the country.

Why did they do it?

"Everyone asks me the same question," Serge said in a telephone interview from Paris, where he was giving a presentation about the trip, one of his main occupations these days when he isn't leading climbing excursions in the French Alps. "It is hard to explain but there are three reasons: To be free. To live a fantastic, wonderful life around the world, and have a challenge. And to help kids." (His Run for Kids fan club raised $300,000 in pledges, which he donated to various children's charities.)

A self-described adventurer, Serge is a former boxing champion who switched to long-distance running in 1982. In previous trips, he ran across California and through 12 countries in Europe. In 1978 he biked across the US and Canada, starting in Worcester.

But none of these adventures was as ambitious as the "World Tour," which started when Serge was 45 and ended on his 50th birthday. It had no shortage of mishaps. Serge suffered severe dehydration in the Sahara. He and Nicole ran smack into civil wars in Guinea and the Congo. Serge nearly lost his eye in Madagascar when a snake bit him. (Nicole caught the event on camera.) He was hit by a taxi in India. They both had bouts of malaria. "It's impossible to escape," Serge said, matter-of-factly. "I was almost dead. If Nicole had not been there, I would have died."

The couple went back to Switzerland only twice - when Nicole needed to be hospitalized for malaria and when Serge's mother died. Never did they consider ending the trip, even though they came to despair of life in a tent. Many times they were nearly overcome by boredom and by a gnawing sense that the trip lacked purpose. "It was very hard and we were sometimes very scared and it was very challenging," he said. For two years afterward, he said he felt tired, "in body and in spirit."

But it taught him an important lesson, he said: "Nothing is impossible if you accept you have to pay the price for the dream."

"Beyond the Epic Run" at Arlington's Regent Theatre Feb. 2 at 7:30 p.m. Followed by a Q&A with producers/directors Thomas Sammon and Paul Rutherford. Call 781-646-4849.or visit www.regenttheatre.com.

Once in a rare while, a journalist is lucky enough to stumble across an untold story about a major piece of history.

It happened to Boston documentary filmmaker Lorie Conway in 1998 when she read a newspaper article about Ellis Island showing photographs of its abandoned hospital complex. The granddaughter of Irish immigrants who had passed through Ellis Island found that her interest was piqued. She called the National Park Service to learn more about the massive facility, which consisted of 22 buildings crammed onto two small man-made islands built with dirt excavated when the New York subway system was constructed. Conway was told that no book or film had ever been produced about the hospital, which was considered ultra-modern for its time and was the country's first line of defense against the diseases that immigrants carried.

The filmmaker was invited to tour the hospital, or what was left of it. Closed in 1954, it still contained beds and gurneys that had been left to rust. The salt air had permeated the building where windows had been left open. "It was truly like Mother Nature had reclaimed these buildings," said Conway, a Peabody award-winning producer who has worked for WCVB and WGBH.

"There was a 500-foot hallway that connected all the wards, broken windows with vines of ivy growing through, a tree poking up through the linoleum floor outside the operating room. Here was something in the middle of New York Harbor that was literally rotting away in front of you. The history just jumped out at you. It got under my skin. I was like a dog with a bone for 10 years."

Finally, she gets to relinquish that bone: Her documentary about America's immigrant hospital, "Forgotten Ellis Island" airs tomorrow on WGBH. (Her companion book by the same name has been published by Smithsonian Books.)

Excavating the history of the hospital, which was busiest from 1902-1930, was a long and sometimes frustrating effort, since there is no central repository of the hospital's records. Conway combed through dusty files at the National Archives, the Public Health Archives, and Ellis Island Library, among other sources, and slowly pieced together the hospital's story. She learned that its dual mission - to treat sick immigrants with dignity, and to protect the United States from the diseases they carried - reflected the country's ambivalence toward newcomers as well as a dark side of American immigration policy.

"On the one hand, we want them when we need them, and on the other hand, we repel and reject them and impose restrictions when they're no longer wanted," Conway said. Countless dramas were played out at the publicly-funded facility, where many were successfully treated for such diseases as cholera, tuberculosis, and trachoma; 3,500 died; and 350 immigrant babies were born (many of them named after the doctors and nurses who delivered them).

An unknown number were separated from their families and deported because they were ensnared in the politics of immigration. (Immigration Commissioner William Williams was known to have described undesirable immigrants as "lumps of poisonous leaven.") US law barred the entry of those considered "feebleminded," a policy that invited facial profiling. Conway's research unearthed photographs of obviously ethnic-looking immigrants who came through Ellis Island but were labeled feeble-minded and didn't make the cut. "The [pictures] struck me as so pathetic and sad," Conway said. "They just looked overwhelmed and afraid."

She hopes her work raises awareness about Ellis Island Hospital, which has received federal money to begin restoration. "I think the story of the hospital represents who we are as a nation," she said. "Caring and compassionate, but also very selective in accepting newcomers."

"Forgotten Ellis Island" will air on WGBH Feb. 2 at 10 p.m. and Feb. 8 at 2:30 p.m.

Science on Screen. The Coolidge Corner Theatre will screen, appropriately enough, "Groundhog Day" on Feb. 2 at 7 p.m. Before the film, physicist and science historian Peter Galison will briefly discuss the physics and philosophy of time. www.coolidge.org, 617-734-2501.

"They Killed Sister Dorothy." On Feb. 3, Emmanuel College will be hosting the only Boston-area showing of "They Killed Sister Dorothy," which chronicles the life and murder of Sister Dorothy Stang, who worked on behalf of the indigenous people of Brazil for 40 years. www.emmanuel.edu.

The Nervous Art of Ken Jacobs. The Harvard Film Archive presents works by avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs Feb. 6-8. Jacobs will join the discussion at all three screenings. www.hcl.harvard.edu/hfa, 617-495-4700.