Sing Freetown’ has been awarded the Best Feature Documentary Film for this year’s Global Cinema Film Festival of Boston.

Sing Freetown is a film to reclaim Sierra Leone from negative media narratives and the damaging legacy of colonial rule created by Emmy-winning filmmaker and investigative journalist, Sorious Samura with his best friend Sierra Leone’s most famous playwright, Charlie Heffner.

The Global Cinema Film Festival is on a mission to allow filmmakers to spotlight stories that deserve global recognition. Through the visual language of film, they explore sensitive stories captured by unflinching lenses held by filmmakers with the audacity to inform, inspire and visually transport audiences to that sacred place called the cinema.

Sorious Samura is Sierra Leone’s best-known investigative journalist. For over 25 years, he has produced documentaries on the toughest issues in the region including civil, starvation, AIDS, corruption, attitudes to homosexuality, and more.

Samura also produced the “Cry Freetown” documentary, which gives an insight into 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 in January 1999.

Charlie Heffner is the founder and director-general of the thirty-three-year-old performance troupe the Freetong (Freetown) Players. He has used drama as a tool for education and development and to advance Sierra Leone’s post-war reconciliation.

The film was recently premiered in Freetown on May 15, 2022, at the Bintumani International Conference Center under the official patronage of His Excellency Dr. Julius Maada Bio, the President of Sierra Leone.