Shooting Freetown

I am extremely pleased to announce that Shooting Freetown has been selected to be screened at the very first Sierra Leone International Film Festival, which takes place in a variety of locations across Freetown from March 29th to April 3rd 2012.

Shooting Freetown will be screened on Friday 30th March at 4pm in the Ministry of Tourism.

This is a really exciting development for creativity in the city and I hope it continues as a platform for local talent within Sierra Leone. Along with the first Opin Yu Yi Festival last month it seems that Freetown is really starting to develop a healthy festival calendar, lets hope it keeps on growing!

It also gives me great pleasure to have the film screened at a festival co-organised by my friend Arthur and the rest of the WeOwnTV team. The festival also features screenings of films made by KP and Janneh at The Visual Arts Studio - Deadly Misfortune and Dark Side of Life.

The full programme can be found below:

Good luck to everyone in Freetown involved in the festival, I'm sure it'll be a tremendous success and I hope I can be there in person next year!

A teaser for a very special event coming to Freetown very soon... more info to follow

This is just a quick post to highlight some of the great work being done by Idriss Kpange and team at Concept Multimedia in Freetown.

I spent a fair bit of time last summer hanging out and shooting at the Concept Studio at King Tom Bridge. This is where Concept produced a video for Paps' song Freetown Girls (I'll be doing a more detailed post on this soon).

(download)

Click here to download:

dust-yu-sef-and-opin-yu-yi-nzHAegiysefdqDgwleop.zip (9.78 MB)

Here's the latest video from Concept for the artist Ma B, who along with Paps is a member of the Def Unit crew. Keep your eyes peeled for Paps' appearance in the video!

The latest video by Sierra Leone's hottest artist, Ma B. The song speaks about forgetting life's problems, "dusting yourself" and moving on with life.

Video was shot on location in Murray Town, Freetown (Ma B's "hood") and involved people from the community.

Mr Kpange, alongside his partner Sabrina Mahtani of Advocaid, is also behind Opin Yu Yi (Krio for Open Your Eyes), Sierra Leone's first human rights film festival.

It will be taking place later this month in a selection of venues across the city, from the British Council to the Kroo Bay community field. They will be showing a selection of fantastic documentaries highlighting human rights issues, including two recent US co-productions: War Don Don and Fambul Tok, as well as Lost Freetown which Kpange himself was involved in.

I'd really like to commend them on their excellent work and I wish I could be there to support the festival in person - maybe next year!

UPDATE: Full programme announced

Best wishes and a happy new year from Shooting Freetown

Enjoy a festive tune courtesy of WeOwnTV's own boy wonder Barmmy Boy

Credits: Lansana Mansaray 
http://www.weowntv.org/posts/58/season-greetings-from-freetown/

I'll be kicking 2012 off with a special feature on WeOwnTV, Sierra Leone's slavery heritage and the importance of Salonean self expression...

See you on the other side!

Take a look at the Shooting Freetown Vimeo Channel

You can watch the two full length collaborative music and drama videos which were included in the film, plus all the new content I will upload in the coming months

UPDATE: You can now also watch all of Shooting Freetown here too!

http://vimeo.com/channels/shootingfreetown

Enjoy!

As they say in Freetown, Kusheh!

So, as you have probably deduced, I have decided to start a blog. 

I'm going to keep updating it with plenty of interesting content, not so much my musings on life the universe and everything, but instead posts that give some more context to the events and issues in the film Shooting Freetown, photos, videos and links to related stories.

I hope you keep calling back, please Respond (to the left), Like or Tweet any post via the buttons at the bottom, or send me an email from the link above.

It's been almost five months since I left Freetown following my 2 month filming project this Summer (or Rainy Season) after which I returned home to Manchester to carry out the demanding editing process, as well as completing my Masters Degree. I managed to survive both - the film was screened in the University alongside the excellent work of my coursemates and my graduation is next week!

Now I'm based in Manchester and working on new projects, attempting to put my newly honed skills to use. I'm also busy sending Shooting Freetown off to many film festivals around the world, so if I get a thumbs up from any of them I'll post the results here!

I hope to return to Freetown soon to continue the work I started and experiment more with collaborative ethnographic documentary techniques, but until then I'm going to edit together some short pieces from all the footage that didn't make it into the final film... watch this space!

Kieran