The New Boats

Report From the Field: In the new year our team has been very busy in the field, shooting footage for our film The New Boats and solidifying relationships that will give us even deeper access to locations, characters and information we need to tell a powerful and well balanced story. Most significantly we have been working with our main characters Woody and Lilian. Woody is the Public Relations Officer of Sierra Leone Artisanal Fishermen Union and has been passionately advocating on behalf of local fishermen. He and his community surveillance team has been desperately trying to prevent an environmental disaster with West African fisheries on the brink of collapse. We have had series of successful shoots out at sea with the community surveillance boat. We have seen more closely and captured what the situation at sea looks like when confronting foreign vessels. The majority of the boats are Chinese and there are also Korean and few russian fleets. We have obtained evidences proving the damages foreign fishing vessels are causing to fishermen directly and the environment. The boats are often manned by other African laborers and the unhealthy working conditions of some of these vessels is appalling. The rate at which many of them are coming into Sierra Leone from neighbouring Guinea where they are banned is also on the increase.

In our country, the issues brought on by these new boats goes far beyond just affecting the livelihood of those working in fishing. This is a serious threat to food security as a country and regionally. Socially it is an attack on our culture and way of life that has both direct and indirect consequences. Many fishermen are being forced to move or take labor jobs on foreign boats with substandard regard for human rights. Additionally the relationship of the prevalence of  child sex workers to these foreign fishing vessels is widespread. We also began filming with Lillian, a former commercial sex worker who now wants to play her part in exposing the sex trade going on between foreign fishing vessels and local pimps. The team has been able to go into communities with her and film activities that are directly related to sexual exploitation. Our relationship with Lilian is becoming very strong and we plan to do some additional embedded shooting with her in March.

We also have reached out to Stop Illegal Fishing, an independent African based non profit hat is very active in policing these practices. They are not yet working in Sierra Leone and expressed very enthusiastic interest in working together with local organizers. We are excited to add a media component to these community surveillance efforts and data collection and want to launch an accountability website that will tie human story to this type of data collection and presentation.

With Grattituide,