Filmmaker Ole Schell, who grew up in Bolinas, has made documentaries about high-fashion models (by following around his ex-girlfriend, on and off, for five years) and about a hip hop dancer who performed in China with Yo-Yo Ma and Meryl Streep. But he really likes stories of escape. “I always like something that is full of adventure, and I thought that Deo’s story was so unbelievable that it would make an interesting short film,” he said of a doctor from Burundi who managed to escape the brutal civil war only to return over a decade later to set up a health clinic. Mr. Schell, who now divides his time between Stinson Beach and New York City, recently released on YouTube a short, 20-minute documentary about Deo Niyizonkiza. Mr. Niyizonkiza grew up in a remote village in Burundi, where classes would sometimes shrink by half over the school year when schoolmates died of preventable diseases. He decided to be a healer, so he enrolled in medical school in the capital. But one day, when he was an intern, a friend told him that a Tutsi man had assassinated the leader of Burundi, who was a Hutu. Mr. Niyizonkiza, a Tutsi, says in the documentary that the anger between the groups had mostly been invented many decades ago by Belgian colonialists; regardless of the dubious origins of the strife, the country immediately fell into bloody civil war that led to the death of 300,000 people. He hid in his dorm room that very day, but didn’t lock the door. His forgetfulness turned out to be his saving grace; Hutu militants broke into rooms with locked doors and killed the people inside, but assumed the unlocked door meant no one was around, saving Mr. Niyizonkiza’s life. In trying to survive the war, he managed to escape to a camp in Rwanda, but he almost died there for lack of food. He eventually returned to Burundi and, with the help of a friend, posed as a coffee salesman to secure a temporary visa to escape to the United States. But America didn’t end his struggles. He spoke no English. At first he lived in a dangerous abandoned tenement in Harlem, then slept in Central Park at night after delivering groceries for $15 a day. But eventually a woman on his route took him in. The stabilizing influence helped him attend Columbia University and, later, Harvard University’s School of Public Health. He started working for a nonprofit that sends doctors to impoverished areas around the world. During a stint in Rwanda working for the organization, Mr. Niyizonkiza went to Burundi to visit his mother. Seeing the state of his home village spurred him to work with the community to build a health clinic there. Mr. Schell’s film will be part of an exhibit called “From Here,” featuring artists raised in West Marin, which will open on April 11 at the Bolinas Museum. Watch the documentary, “Deo: Escape from Burundi,” at youtube.com/watch?v=Ha04aRFYhT0.