New Boats

Synopsis

New Boats portrays the lives of fishers and their families in Tombo, the largest artisanal fishing port in Sierra Leone. Director Barmmy Boy offers a textured portrait of the fishing industry, from the hum of boat engines to the crackling of fish kilns. The film’s title signals the arrival of Chinese and Korean semi-industrial trawlers, whose illegal drag-net fishing practices deplete local fish stocks. These new boats threaten traditional foodways not only in Tombo but across Sierra Leone, driving migration and unraveling Tombo’s social fabric. At the same time, the film’s theme of “new boats” also reflects one family’s collective effort to rebuild a boat after a heavy storm, opening into a larger narrative around the impacts of climate change. Filmed over three years, New Boats shows how the people of Tombo find ways to sustain themselves and their relations amid intersecting forces of economic, social, and political change.

Director Bio

Lansana Mansaray (Barmmy Boy) is a Freetown-based director of photography, musician, and Emmy and Peabody Award nominated filmmaker. His feature documentary, New Boats, debuted on ARTE in 2022 and explores the lives of Freetown Peninsula fisherman whose livelihoods and family legacies are threatened by industrial Asian trawlers that overfish the waters off West Africa. In 2018, Barmmy co-directed and co-produced Survivors, which explored the complexity of the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone. Survivors became the first West African film to receive an Emmy nomination. He is a founder and production manager of WeOwnTV at the Freetown Media Center, which provides local filmmakers with intensive media production training and professional development. Barmmy’s work as a filmmaker has garnered grant support from numerous international agencies, including ITVS, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Doc Society, Catapult Film Fund, the Bertha Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

 

Distribution

AfriDocs
Contact: info@steps.co.za
Full Film: https://www.afridocs.net/watch-now/new-boats/ 

 

Most often when communities have problems, we – that is, people coming from outside – think we know what’s best, and we import solutions for them. So for communities to articulate what they think could be the solutions to some of their problems is at the heart of the films that we make and the stories that we tell.