Sorious Samura (born 27 October 1963) is a Sierra Leonean journalist. He is best known for two
CNN documentary films: ''
Cry Freetown
''Cry Freetown'' is a 2000 documentary film directed by Sorious Samura. It is an account of the victims of the Sierra Leone Civil War and depicts the most brutal period with the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels capturing the capital city (J ...
'' (2000) and ''Exodus from Africa'' (2001). The self-funded ''Cry Freetown'' depicts the most brutal period of the civil war in
Sierra Leone with
RUF rebels capturing the capital city (January 1999).
The film won, among other awards, an
Emmy Award
The Emmy Awards, or Emmys, are an extensive range of awards for artistic and technical merit for the American and international television industry. A number of annual Emmy Award ceremonies are held throughout the calendar year, each with the ...
and a
Peabody. ''Exodus from Africa'' shows the harrowing effort by the best of young African male blood to break through to Europe via death- and danger-ridden paths from Sierra Leone and
Nigeria, via
Mali, the
Sahara
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, photo_caption = The Sahara taken by Apollo 17 astronauts, 1972
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desert,
Algeria, and
Morocco through the
Strait of Gibraltar
The Strait of Gibraltar ( ar, مضيق جبل طارق, Maḍīq Jabal Ṭāriq; es, Estrecho de Gibraltar, Archaic: Pillars of Hercules), also known as the Straits of Gibraltar, is a narrow strait that connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Medi ...
to Spain.
In his recent two projects ''Living with Hunger'' and ''Living with Refugees'' (nominated for an Emmy award), he takes reality television to its extreme, becoming the central character in the films by living the lifestyle of an Ethiopian villager and Sudanese
refugee
A refugee, conventionally speaking, is a displaced person who has crossed national borders and who cannot or is unwilling to return home due to well-founded fear of persecution. respectively; in doing this, he tries to break the boundary between "us" (the people watching on TV) and "them" (those before the camera) by becoming one of them (albeit for just a month). ''Living with Corruption'', his latest documentary to be shown on CNN, describes the shocking reality of how corruption is spread across society both in Sierra Leone and Kenya, affecting mostly the poor.
In 2010, Samura investigated attitudes to homosexuality in Africa in the
Dispatches documentary ''Africa's Last Taboo'', produced for
Channel 4. Samura is also one of the directors of Insight News TV, an independent television production company in the UK focused on international current affairs programming.
Samura attended the Methodist Boys High School in the east end of Freetown. , he works in London, UK, and considers both London and
Freetown his hometowns.
References
External links
African chemists caught selling aidCry FreetownReturn to FreetownInsight News TV , Online Documentary Films
1963 births
Living people
Television journalists
Sierra Leonean journalists
Sierra Leonean documentary filmmakers
Temne people
People from Freetown
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