SURVIVING HUNGER
Monday February 9, 2004 at 10PM ET/PT
repeating Monday July 19, 2004 at 10PM ET/PT
"I'm so hungry I'd happily take food from a baby." - Sorious Samura
Surviving Hunger Picks Up Grand Prix Japan Prize.
What is the everyday experience of living through starvation really like? Where do people find the strength to go on? Award-winning documentary filmmaker Sorious Samura (Cry Freetown) spent a month in a famine-wracked Ethiopian village to chronicle the extraordinary story of a family and community struggling to survive.
READ MORE ABOUT SURVIVING HUNGER ON THE NATIONAL WEBSITE.
Born into a poor family in Sierra Leone, Samura freely admits that 10 years in London have made him soft. He travels to a village two days from Addis Ababa, in the remote north, a region where half a million people are destitute. On his arrival, Samura moves in with the village elder and his family. This is a devout, Christian community, and the next morning is spent, with the rest of the village, in church. The locals are alarmed by what they see as his colossal size compared with their wiry, malnourished physiques. "I've heard with my own ears that Samura eats people," says one. Samura reveals he is there to tell the world of their struggle.
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Existing on the same paltry diet as the villagers, Samura discovers the truth behind the Ethiopian government's claim to be distributing sufficient food aid for everyone in the country, and learns of the brutal hardship involved in having to work the fields with little or no food in his belly. Twenty years after a million Ethiopians died in terrible famine, one in five still face a daily struggle to find enough to eat.
After four days, exhausted and shocked by the lack of food, Samura worries he may not last a week-let alone a month. But it is not until he moves in with another family that he discovers he's been living relatively well. His new hosts have been given grain for sixty days as part of the government aid package-but their allowance of 12.5 kg a month is meant to feed one person, not an entire family. The food quickly runs out, and the family is forced to live off an unpalatable weed called Wild Cabbage.
By month's end, Samura has lost forty pounds - but has gained a gut-wrenching insight into the reality of living through severe hunger. With his unique style of filmmaking, Samura powerfully questions how we can expect Africa to develop when so many Africans are engaged in the daily struggle to simply survive.
Surviving Hunger is produced by An Insight News Television Production for Discovery Times in association with CBC (Canada), Channel 4 UK, CNNI, Twee Vandaag. It is directed by Charlotte Metcalf, written by Sorious Samura.
