This documentary will offer a different vision of Sierra Leone to that found in any movie made in or about the country

In films, the portrayal of Sierra Leone tends to be downbeat, with images of gunrunning, blood diamonds, disease, poverty and corruption. Sierra Leone: An Artist’s Journey, however, will look in depth into the country’s cultural history as it follows the country's most celebrated theatre director Charlie Haffner. Geoffrey Macnab reports

Sierra Leone’s most celebrated theatre director Charlie Haffner, the subject of upcoming documentary Sierra Leone: An Artist’s Journey, captured on location (Clive Patterson)

When outsiders think of Sierra Leone on film, stock images come to mind: gun-running, blood diamonds, disease, poverty, corruption. In documentaries and in feature films alike, the portrayal of the country tends to be very downbeat. In Graham Greene adaptation The Heart Of The Matter, (1953) Trevor Howard played a colonial policeman in Sierra Leone driven to suicide. More recently, Sorious Samura’s Emmy-winning Cry Freetown (2000) captured the horrific atrocities in the civil war of the 1990s. The 27-minute documentary is said to have influenced the UK to take military action in Sierra Leone.

As Samura notes, such films, even his own, provide only a very limited view of a country that used to be known as “the Athens of West Africa” and that has an extraordinarily rich cultural tradition.

Samura is part of a team currently preparing a major new documentary, Sierra Leone: An Artist’s Journey, which will look in depth into the country’s cultural history. The film, which Samura is producing and which is directed by Clive Patterson, will follow Sierra Leone’s most celebrated theatre director Charlie Haffner as he prepares and stages a hugely ambitious new play.

Emmy and Bafta award-winning filmmaker Sorious Samura, procucer of the new documentary (Clive Patterson)

Through theatre, Haffner is trying to reconnect the people of the country with their past and to enable them to make sense of the upheaval through which they’ve lived in recent times.

“It is very bold. The idea of doing a post-Shakespearian epic about the history of Sierra Leone is fascinating,” enthuses the BBC’s documentary supremo Nick Fraser, who is executive producing the project. “What I hope from the project is that you will get some idea of Sierra Leone which isn’t just the normal level of mayhem depicted in the international media.”

There are some very big hurdles to be overcome first. For example, Sierra Leone doesn’t actually have a single dedicated theatre venue.

“Charlie has been one of the pioneers of theatre and culture in Sierra Leone,” Samura says. “He is one of the soldiers who has just kept pushing on and on, regardless of the lack of respect and lack of funding. He genuinely believes in art and in culture. He believes that is the one way you can empower a nation. He is one person who believes that if you neglect your culture, you are neglecting the people.”

Haffner has been involved in theatre groups in Sierra Leone since the late 1960s. Samura first met him at the Methodist Boys’ High School in Freetown. Haffner had just left the school but came back as a teacher when Samura was a pupil. The two kept in touch and were both involved in the theatre company, Tabule. Samura realised quickly how street theatre helped bridge the gap between rival tribes.

Thanks to his documetaries such as Cry Freetown and Living With Hunger, Samura has sometimes been accused of (as he puts it) “selling out to the West, of being a puppet of the West and of being used by the West to tell negative stories about Africa”. Fellow journalists and politicians have attacked him for portraying the continent in such a negative light at a time when many of ts own citizens are fleeing to build new lives elsewhere. After Cry Freetown, when he travelled to Liberia to make a film about dictator Charles Taylor, he was arrested and tortured – and only finally released after Nelson Mandela intervened on behalf of him and his crew.

Samura argues that such work simply articulated the concerns of ordinary people who’ve been confronted with corruption and calamity in their backyard. “But that hasn’t quite yielded the end goals and aims that I had wanted,” the filmmaker reflects.

The new film promises to be very much more upbeat. The filmmakers are looking to “find a way of telling the other story of Africa – of getting people to understand that there is another Sierra Leone, especially after Ebola”. Samura and his fellow filmmakers are aiming to counter the stereotype of “a country that can’t look after itself, a desperate country, where people are waiting with begging bowls. I know that this is a beautiful country I grew up in and that I meet other people (from Sierra Leone) who are amazing. I think that if we can tell that other side, maybe investors and tourists can see this country differently and want to do business with this country”.

Daniel Platzman of Grammy-award-winning band Imagine Dragons is composing an original score, combining “locally sourced and recorded Sierra Leonean music with dramatic, percussive compositions” for the film.

Part of the fascination of the documentary is that nobody knows just how Charlie Haffner’s epic play will turn out. Jonathan Ossoff, managing director and chief executive of Insight TWI (the outfit making the film, acknowledges that the project is very different from the usual current affairs, investigative filmmaking the company specialises in. The film is in pre-prdouction and starts filming in earnest in September. “This is the most respected artist in this country taking on the most ambitious project in his life, really the magnum opus toward the end of his career, a work of theatre that can have a lasting impact on Sierra Leone’s cultural identity,” Ossoff says of Charlie Haffner’s play.

Whatever happens, the filmmakers will be there to chronicle it. One prediction can safely be made. Their documentary will offer a very different vision of Sierra Leone to that found in any other move made in or about the country – and Samura won’t be arrested for making it.

‘Sierra Leone: An Artist’s Journey’ will be released next year