Investigative Journalist/Film-Maker
Emmy, BAFTA, and Peabody winner Sorious Samura is a widely respected African film and television journalist. Since his debut on the international stage with Emmy-winning Cry Freetown (2000), the Sierra Leone native has produced and presented dozens of powerful and innovative documentaries for major international broadcasters. Some of these films also won him, One World Media Awards, Broadcast Journalist of the Year, Time Magazine European Heroes Award and the Du Pont Award. Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism has honoured Samura with a lifetime achievement award at its annual “Let’s Do It Better” workshop on race relations.
Cry Freetown was followed by another Emmy-winning film, Exodus from Africa (2001), a story of young Africans migrating to Europe across the Sahara desert. His film Cry Freetown led to the Oscar nominated Hollywood movie Blood Diamond with Leonardo DiCaprio. Samura was consultant during the making of Blood Diamond and was also instrumental in helping Ed Zwick, the director in writing the script. In 2003 Samura received an honorary doctorate from the University of East Anglia, England.
From 2004 to 2007, Sorious presented the groundbreaking and Emmy-nominated ‘Living With…’ series.
In 2010 and 2011, Sorious helped produce the One World Media Award-winning Africa Investigates series, featuring undercover investigations spearheaded by local investigative journalists across the African continent. In 2012, he embedded with the Uganda People’s Defence Force in the Central African Republic to present a documentary for the BBC about the hunt for LRA leader Joseph Kony. He has worked all over the world for major broadcasters like PBS (America) CNN, Aljazeera, BBC, Channel4, CBC Canada and ABC TV (Australia). Samura helped direct a 90mins documentary film on Voodoo, featuring Beninese Hollywood star, Djimon Hounsou. The film is aimed at changing the western narrative on Voodoo while using this theme as an opportunity to help Benin rebrand itself but most importantly give the African continent a much bigger platform to tell its own story on voodoo from the bottom – up. Currently Samura is working on films and projects that are not only aimed at changing the narrative of the African people but also to empower Africans to own their own stories and their own narratives. Presently, Sorious is based in the UK.