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.
Full film