God No Say So (Rotterdam International Film Festival 2010) was shot between December 2005 and March 2006, three years after the 11-year-war officially ended. Imagine, the Sky (2011) was shot in Freetown during that same period. The stadium massacre in Conakry occurred while the film was nearly finished, on 28 Sept. 2009. That event echoed what had happened in Sierra Leone. Citizens had no rights, despite the omnipresence of major world governments, the UN, and NGOs. Human Rights Watch publicized an investigation shortly aftewards. Unlike its 50 page reports by well educated researchers of previous years, it was a short paper which mostly related the story of one woman who was taken away from the stadium, raped for days then left naked on a street corner. It poorly represented the pictures and stories one could find on the Internet shortly afterwards, of the terror inflicted on the young crowd by security forces. Human Rights Watch confused the public with stories of sex and rape, and the press followed their lead -- a recurring theme which should be familiar to all of us. Now, in 2014, the court proceedings against the then president of Guinea are sealed, in a land far away from the red dust or mud of Conakry. So far as we know, there has been no justice by the courts, nor the political bodies. The stadium massacre is a footnote to God No Say So, which runs after the credits. A strange placement perhaps, but we did not witness it, and we do not trust what we read on the Internet nor elsewhere in the media, so it seemed appropriate to separate it from the film. At the time, there was a useful forum website in Guinea, which was frozen at the time of the DSK scandal.


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