Following a recommendation from a family friend, a Sierra Leonean herself, I carried out a scoping trip to Freetown in September 2010 in order to establish contacts and familiarise myself with the city and any potential themes for my documentary. Following the trip and my own research, I was struck by the disparity between the unanimously bleak media representations of the country and my own experience of being there.
As I began to consider the work carried out by anthropologists and ethnographic film-makers in Sierra Leone and West Africa, I began to consider an approach towards making a film which could reveal another side to life in this city.
After two months of fieldwork in Summer 2011 and a further two months preparation and editing, the result was Shooting Freetown, a short film which mixes observational documentary with collaborative music and drama video projects to reveal the creative lives of those in post-war Sierra Leone.
