Michaella Sallu

SIERRA LEONE

The Journey

School-aged girls are asked to queue in lines to gather the limited clean drinking water available in contemporary Sierra Leone, forcing them to travel long distances through different villages. However, doing so has contributed to a rise in teenage pregnancies, as new groups of boys and girls intermingle. The film uses this issue as a lens to explore how symptoms of poverty compound each other.

Michaella Fatmata Sallu is a video and film producer and director, designed to explore major social and environmental issues facing women, young girls and boys in Freetown Sierra Leone, as the country struggles to grow into a strong democracy after years of civil war, Ebola and flooding. Michaella works in conjunction with WAI (Women Against Inhumanity), a non-profit charity she founded that is helping to address the many social problems facing women and children in Sierra Leone, particularly after the scourge of the war and Ebola.