New Boats
Logline
Tombo village has relied on fishing for centuries but now their livelihood is threatened by the arrival of Asian trawlers who over-fish on their shores. Sullay, the son of a master fisherman tries to carry the family tradition and resist the pull to leave the village and look for work as fish decline. Community organizer Woodie reunites wives with their husbands who have left.
Synopsis
The village of Tombo has flourished in the Freetown Peninsula since pre-colonial times, its people harvesting from the sea, yet taking care of it so that it continues to feed future generations. But for decades now, this prosperity has been on the decline due to an influx of Asian trawlers, colloquially named chigie-chorga by the locals, overfishing on their shores with clandestine support from corrupt officials. The women of the village are also losing work as most of them earn a living processing the catch and selling at the market. Their husbands and sons are frequently forced to abandon fishing in Tombo and look for work in other countries. With outright corruption and neglect from the government the fish population on their shores are dwindling and their livelihoods are beginning to disappear. Sullay and Woodie work to unite their unravelling community, but will they succeed against these powerful odds?
Director
Lansana (Barmmy Boy) Mansaray
Lansana Mansaray, aka Barmmy Boy, is a multi-talented director of photography, filmmaker and musician who lives in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Barmmy is a founding member and the current production manager at the Freetown Media Centre. Barmmy has been honoured by the British Council on numerous occasions and has been selected to travel abroad in order to represent the creative youth of Sierra Leone to England, USA, Denmark, China, Kenya, Ivory Coast and Ghana. His film credits include Youth, Charity, They Resisted and Disability is Inability. He has worked as a cameraman and fixer on many award-winning international productions including Decisions, Girl Rising, They Are We and the Emmy award-winning Meet the Africans: Many Rivers to Cross. Barmmy also co-directed the Emmy-nominated film on the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, Survivors.
Producers
Arthur Pratt
FREETOWN MEDIA CENTRE
Arthur Pratt is a 2019 Emmy Award nominee for Survivors, and community leader based in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Arthur is a co-founder of the Sierra Leone Film Council, the country’s first media-makers’ union. He has started and leads multiple community film and theatre groups, collaboratively writing and performing numerous films and plays with ex-combatants, former child prostitutes and community members. He is a co- founder and manager of the WeOwnTv program in Sierra Leone and the Freetown Media Centre with numerous credits and awards for the films and plays he has produced. Film credits include Charity (which received festival awards at the Pan African Film Festival Los Angeles, Cinema by the Bay San Francisco and Semana del Cine Experimental de Madrid, Spain), Black Sugar, They Resisted, Hustler, Gift of My Eyes, M’Pora, Land Grab, Police Case- Sexual Gender Based Violence, Leh We Larn, Winter in Freetown and Tracking the VGGT.
Don Edkins
STEPS
Don Edkins is a South African documentary filmmaker and producer based in Cape
Town. He has produced documentary film projects that have been broadcast around
the world, such as Steps for the Future, Why Democracy? and Why Poverty? earning
multiple international awards, including an Oscar for Taxi to the Dark Side, and the
Special Teddy Award at the 63rd Berlinale for Steps for the Future. The Peabody
awarded Why Poverty? Project, with documentary films from 21 countries, was
screened globally by 70 broadcasters. He is Executive Producer of AfriDocs, a free-to-
view VOD platform and broadcast strand across Africa that screens the best African
and international documentary films. He is currently producing a new documentary film
project with African filmmakers across the continent, Generation Africa, around the
theme of migration. He is a mentor for the Berlinale Talents, Durban FilmMart, and
Docs by the Sea in Indonesia, and a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Tiny Mungwe
STEPS
Tiny Mungwe is a documentary film and arts producer. She currently works at STEPS
(Social Transformation and Empowerment Projects) where she produces Generation
Africa, a pan-African anthology of 25 documentary films from 16 countries in Africa, on
the topic of migration. Mungwe’s films include Akekho uGogo, a 48 minute
documentary about urban youth culture, which screened at several festivals including
the Durban International Film Festival, Apollo Film Festival and DOKANEMA Festival.
Her short film script Evelyn was selected for the National Film and Video Foundation
(NFVF) Women Filmmaker Project and she directed another short film in the program,
Daddy’s Boy. She has written for some of the highest rating South African television
dramas such as Muvhango and Matatiele, and was one of the directors on the series
Uzalo. For several years she worked as a festival organizer and programmer for four
international festivals, namely Time of the Writer, the Durban International Film
Festival, Jomba! Contemporary Dance Festival and Poetry Africa. During that time she also worked on the program for Durban FilmMart (the co-production market of the festival) and Talents Durban (a career development program for emerging African filmmakers in partnership with Berlinale Talents). She continues to work as a program curation associate for the Durban FilmMart. She also programmed and curated the city of Durban’s inaugural book and art fair, ARTiculate Africa.
