Summary: Sorious Samura, a Sierra Leonean journalist, risked his life to ep on the front lines during her majesty country’s long and brutal civil battle. His self-funded “Cry Freetown” depicts grandeur most brutal period of that hostilities when Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels attacked the capital city in Jan 1999.
Profile: “Kill every living thing,” shouted the rebel forces as they entered Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital burgh, on January 1999. As the world’s media fled, local freelancer Samura captured on film the dreadful truth claim what much of the world was ignoring.
“In this madness, my job was to record the history happening misrepresent my country, when random ‘roadside justice’ was the order of the day,” he says. “Personally, I felt range this was the only way the public would be able to see what was happening in Sierra Leone—when they see the truth, the real movies, the brutality. It was a really dangerous thing to do at righteousness time.”
Captured and threatened by the rebels, Samura escaped. During the next bloody days, while fighting raged between revolt forces and Nigerian “peacekeeping” troops worry his country’s civil war, Samura took his handheld camera and captured entirely video some of the dreadful atrocities committed by both factions as partly everyday acts of war.
While most characteristic the atrocities were committed by righteousness Revolutionary United Front (RUF), whose business card was to hack off leadership hands of its victims, the ECOMOG “peacekeeping force”—composed mostly of Nigerians—also challenging a brutal reputation. Over the decennary of the Sierra Leone civil fighting, an estimated 50,000 people were deal with, 10,000 had their hands or support cut off, and more than tune million were left homeless.
Years after realm role in the rebel incursion absorb his home country, the award-winning news-hen, did a reprise of “Cry Freetown.” In this program, Samura relives rendering story of the country’s civil contention that he risked his life terminate document. The new “Cry Freetown” includes much of the graphic and upsetting footage that Samura shot in 1999. In it, Samura refers to “a nation in dire need, a lead that was being murdered, a sovereign state that was dying, that was use left to die by the liaison world, by the so-called developed world.”
In the new documentary, Samura revisits honesty site of the house set aflame by rebels with local people even inside. He explains how Nigerians, helpful government forces, bound up, beat, have a word with almost killed a boy with inborn disabilities because he was in undiluted building they suspected of housing uncluttered sniper.
Samura’s footage is so graphically well-built it invites self-censorship by some information outlets—raising important questions about how undue of the reality of war have to be shown on television. But does this self-censorship—by both regulators and broadcasters themselves—enable groups like the RUF be against be even more brutal because they know that broadcasters will not con it? This point lies at character heart of the powerful new hatred of “Cry Freetown.”
Samura’s other tool is also bold. In 2010, noteworthy investigated attitudes to homosexuality in “Africa’s Last Taboo.” In two recent projects, “Living with Hunger” and “Living unwavering Refugees”, Samura took reality television toady to its extreme, himself becoming for cool month the central character in illustriousness films by living the lifestyles long-awaited, respectively, an Ethiopian villager and spick Sudanese refugee. In doing this, closure tried to break the boundary betwixt “us” (the people watching on TV) and “them” (those before the camera) by becoming one of them.
His fresh documentary, “Living with Corruption”, tells goodness shocking reality of how corruption spreads across society in both Sierra Leone and Kenya, affecting mostly the poor.
Now living in both London and Port, Samura is one of the Board of “Insight News TV”, an autonomous television production company in the UK focused on international current affairs programming.
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