The Story
A three-year project connecting Hull and Freetown, Sierra Leone. Community filmmaking, music production, and digital storytelling with young people in one of West Africa’s most challenging post-conflict environments. The same belief that drove every Cafe Society project — that young people everywhere deserve the chance to tell their story well.
Hull to Freetown. 2005 — 2008.
Hull and Freetown, Sierra Leone are twin cities. That relationship has existed for years — official, civic, documented. But in 2005, few people in Hull had any real idea what life in Freetown actually looked like. The Hull to Freetown project set out to change that — not through reports or statistics, but through film, music, art, and the voices of young people on both sides of the world.
The context
Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war ended in 2002. When the Hull to Freetown project began in 2005, the country was still living with the aftermath — not just the physical wreckage of buildings and infrastructure, but the deeper work of a society reconstituting itself after a decade of devastating conflict. At the time of the project’s most intensive activity, Sierra Leone was among the poorest countries in the world.
The project began through a connection with Andrew Benson Green, iEARN manager — the initial contact whose introduction opened the door to Freetown and made everything that followed possible. iEARN — the International Education and Resource Network — provided the institutional framework and the on-the-ground relationships that gave the project its roots in the city.
Into that context, a small team from Hull arrived with cameras, laptops, and a belief that young people in Freetown had stories worth telling — and that young people in Hull deserved to hear them.
The team
The Hull to Freetown project was built on collaboration. Jon Robson — photography, direction, production. Murray Clark — audio and music production. Matt Stephenson — writer and journalist. Andrew Benson Green, iEARN manager — the initial contact whose introduction opened the door to Freetown and made everything that followed possible.
And at the creative heart of the music and community work — Lansana Mansaray, known as Barmmy Boy. iEARN Music Director, Freetown musician, filmmaker, and one of the most significant figures the project ever worked with.
Lansana Mansaray — Barmmy Boy
Lansana Mansaray — Barmmy Boy — first connected with Cafe Society through iEARN. Funded by the British Council, he travelled to the UK on several occasions to undertake media training and work experience with Cafe Society in Hull. He brought Freetown’s music, creative energy, and community knowledge into the heart of the project — and his involvement was central to everything the Hull to Freetown work produced in the city, including the Studio D music video Foolish Man.
What happened next is the most powerful testament to what the project achieved.
In 2009 — one year after Digital Schools was founded — Lansana co-founded the Freetown Media Centre together with American filmmaker Banker White. Today, more than fifteen years later, the Centre has grown into one of the most respected media organisations in West Africa.
The Freetown Media Centre’s vision could have been written by Cafe Society itself:
“To contribute to the advancement of creative arts and digital media in Sierra Leone and the world at large — to continue to lead in the promotion of storytelling and self-expression.”
Its mission — promoting freedom of expression through community engagement, education, and capacity-building — is the Hull to Freetown project, continued. The WeOwnTV Filmmaker Fellowship supports independent documentary filmmakers across Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. The Centre trains human rights campaigners in video production. It runs filmmaking workshops, open air screenings, and professional media services across the region.
Lansana came to Hull to learn. He went back to Freetown and built an institution.
That is what the Hull to Freetown project produced — not just films and installations and music videos, but a filmmaker, a leader, and a media centre that is now shaping the creative industries of an entire subregion of Africa.
What was made
The project produced a substantial and varied body of work over three years:
Community documentary films — young people in Freetown documenting their own lives, their city, and their experience of a society rebuilding itself after conflict. Authentic, unmediated, shot in the streets and schools of Freetown.
Our Freetown — a feature documentary bringing together the voices, images, and stories gathered across the three years of the project into a sustained portrait of the city and its people.
Hull schools screenings — the Freetown films were shown to young people in Hull schools, and Hull students were given the opportunity to respond creatively — generating their own films, writing, and artwork in dialogue with what they had seen.
Studio D — Foolish Man
As part of the digital media work in Freetown, Jon Robson and Murray Clark worked with Studio D Records to produce Foolish Man — a music video performed by Studio D artists, filmed on location in Freetown, Sierra Leone, in 2007.
Taxi — a drive-thru Freetown
The Hull to Freetown project also produced one of the most striking installation works Cafe Society ever created.
Taxi placed viewers inside a full-size cargo container. Inside — four car seats, side by side. On twin screens — one to the left, one to the right — the view from the windows of a taxi moving through Freetown. Left window. Right window. Exactly as it would look if you were sitting in the back seat of that car, moving through the city.
You couldn’t observe from a distance. You were in the car. The city came to you.
What you saw was Freetown unfiltered — markets, mango stalls, tiny bars, hand-painted advertising art on walls and shopfronts. The energy and density of a city that is alive and moving and urgent. And alongside it — the wreckage of the civil war. Buildings never rebuilt. Spaces never reclaimed. The two realities of Freetown, present simultaneously, through a taxi window, with no narration, no mediation, no commentary.
The cargo container as installation vessel was not incidental. A cargo container is how global wealth moves between rich and poor countries — almost invisibly, and almost entirely in one direction. Putting an audience inside one to watch Freetown through a taxi window made that invisible system suddenly, uncomfortably real.
The Wilberforce connection
The Hull to Freetown project — alongside the Ethiopia work — was consciously framed within the William Wilberforce Bicentennial in Hull in 2007, marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade.
Giving Hull students a direct, living connection to Africa — not as a history lesson but as a creative exchange between equals, young people talking to young people across the world — was a deliberate and powerful act of civic education. Hull has a profound historical relationship with the abolition movement. The twin cities relationship with Freetown carries that history forward into the present.
The legacy in full
The Hull to Freetown project ran for three years. It produced community films, a feature documentary, a music video, an immersive installation, school screenings, and a creative exchange between young people separated by five thousand miles and radically different life experiences.
The work carried out in Sierra Leone marked the closing chapter of the Cafe Society years — and directly informed the launch of Digital Schools in 2008, where the same principles would continue through work with schools across the UK.
But its deepest legacy isn’t any single piece of work. It’s Lansana Mansaray standing in the Freetown Media Centre in 2026 — an organisation he built, in his city, on the foundation of skills and relationships that began with a connection to a small digital media organisation in Hull.
That is what it means to give a community the tools to tell their own story.
Jon Robson — photography, direction, production. Murray Clark — audio and music production. Matt Stephenson — writer and journalist. Lansana Mansaray (Barmmy Boy) — iEARN Music Director, creative collaborator. Andrew Benson Green — iEARN manager, initial contact. Hull to Freetown, 2005—2008.
