What's the story?
Fata and Yankuba are two young asylum seekers who fled poverty and a 22-year-dictatorship in The Gambia with very distinct dreams. Fata wants to become a world famous DJ ; Yankuba is an aspiring biochemist. Haunted by the difficulties of their pasts and dreaming of a future with indefinite leave to remain, they escape the boredom and fear of life as asylum-seekers by dancing away their trauma in Teranga, an Afrobeats migrant-run nightclub in Naples.
What's the context?
Just like Fata and Yankuba, nearly 900,000 asylum-seekers across the EU are still waiting for their asylum claims to be processed. In Italy, asylum seekers wait for an average of 19 months for an initial assessment and then can be left waiting for several more years for a final response. While they wait, 81% of these asylum seekers are forced to live in Emergency Reception Centres (CAS), which are often privately run by corrupt and exploitative landlords and social workers.
Often permits are delivered out of date and migrants are forced back into the quest for documentation, suspended for years and unable to participate in society.
How did it come about?
Teranga was born from Sophia’s close relationships with the characters, built over the years she has lived in Naples. These friendships led to overwhelming hospitality from the wider migrant community, and over time Sophia, Daisy and Lou became fully embedded in the migrants' lives. They were invited into homes, to birthdays and religious celebrations, to African clubs, hidden secret home-restaurants and sneaked into off-limits refugee camps to be shown the inhumane conditions.
Inspired by the resilience of this community, the Teranga documentary was conceived to show the complex nature of migrant life after stepping off a dinghy into the hands of the often corrupt and exploitative Italian authorities, and to show how music manifests as a wanted relief from trauma and racism.
The film was commissioned by Guardian Documentaries, who funded the edit, however, to finish the film we need money to pay for the post-production and music.
What are the primary costs we need your help for?
- Pay the migrant artists for their tracks in the film
- Sound design
- Colour Grade
- Composer
- Posters and artwork
- Festival applications
- Archive news footage costs
- Assist the migrant musicians to release their tracks.
Importantly, once you have helped us finish the film we plan to host screenings in the UK and mainland Europe, engaging young audiences with the migrant phenomena using music as an entry point to change perceptions and prejudice towards west-African migrants. We hope money from the initial screenings will go towards a migrant run studio in Naples (where the tracks for this documentary were recorded), helping artists to record music while they wait for their documents.
We also plan to provide long term support for our protagonists and the asylum seeker artists who make the music in the documentary, ultimately pairing them with mentors in the UK to help them fulfill their goals.
Who are we?
We are three female co-directors.
Sophia is a British activist, freelance journalist for The Guardian and founder of bespoke tour guiding company Looking for Lila based in Naples. She previously worked for Island Records in the UK and was drawn to Teranga night club, where the saw the potential in the migrant artists. She joined Daisy on the BBC’s Exodus: Our Journey to Europe team as a fixer, sharing with them her expertise on the migrant communities.
Daisy has a Social Anthropology degree, and worked at PBS Frontline in New York before moving back to London and working as an AP for three years on the Bafta and Emmy award winning BBC documentary series “Exodus”, which follows migrants on their journeys to and through Europe. Since finishing on Exodus, Daisy has worked with director Dan Reed on his BBC film about Calais and director Dan Gordon on his BBC series about historic child abuse in football. She has taken her experience from working in TV documentaries and applied it to work on her own films.
Lou has been directing, shooting and editing short-documentaries ever since she graduated from the Columbia journalism school. She was a video producer for Bustle in NYC before moving to Stockholm, where she works as a freelance filmmaker and the correspondent for French newspaper Libération. She focuses most of her work on women and migration, from drug-addicted mothers and their children in New Jersey to female political activists in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
We have worked together on this documentary for two years, sleeping on Sophia’s sofa in Naples (and occasionally in migrant camps across the region), whilst continuing to work on other projects on the side to be able to continue filming. We have been able to keep the costs to a minimum, but we now need your help to finish the film and for it to fulfill its full potential. Any donation, however small, will be of immense help for us to reach our goal.
