Schwarze Sonne
Matryoshkas
Dasia: Als ich hierher zurück kam
Schaudern in Ruinen
Die Zone
Dasia: Gott war gut
Peanut Butter
Mikado
Morie - Prinz der Toten
Der Glaube der Vögel
No shame!
Mein Traum war
City of Rest
No Monkey
Dasia: Das gute Gemetzel
Eine Nacht im Florida
Über Gewalt berichten
…
nominated
Marion Dönhoff Award for international understanding and reconciliation 2011
German Human Rights Film Award 2014
2014 and 2015 Kolga Photo Award for best annual reportage
…
awarded
culture prize 2016 of the Evangelical Lutheran Church Hannover
He travels incognito wrapped by night: a dark honeycomb throbbing the darkness. This man is exactly that, a black sun radiating negative light, a bulimic star sipping however much life happens around him. He moves, and the darkness expands with each step.
Welcome to Charles Taylor’s King Lear.
The battle cry of the rebels in Sierra Leone during the advance on Freetown in January 1999 had a terrifying simplicity about it: “No Living Thing.” A human being was not worth living, or did not ask for more remorse, than a chicken, a dog, a goat, perhaps because each soldier was previously turned into a beast, emptied of any values considered vaguely human. Or the combatants were even prevented for learning those values. It is the obvious case of the swarm of children caught in the war machine, of fighters methodically alienated by drugs, abuse or indoctrination.
A master narrative on violence, politics, justice, trauma and humanity by Dasia Masaquoi – in memoriam! A spoken moral essay, literally walking down Broad Street. “You see fear. Raw fear. And that raw fear is turned and transcended into power. The other side is a mirror. You are in the driver’s seat and there’s a victim in fear. And this fear is reflected between two people. This violence, you go into it and you don’t question yourself again.”
One madman completely naked masturbates alone in the empty street, ignoring the soldiers running past him for shelter as the Katiuska mortars start to whistle and fall in the neighborhood.
June 1998, Bissau: two armies fighting street by street with heavy artillery. The farewell to Amílcar Cabral, the founding father and moral reference of the nation.
In the rebel area with Commander Alpha Mike, the only officer leading an outpost of child soldiers, all high on drugs and beer. “ – Careful, get his weapon!-” Before a burst of gunfire could erupt, the rebel was brought to his knees by his colleagues, to a flurry of lashing with belt buckles, till he offered no further resistance or reply, his eyebrow cut, humiliated, drooling blood and dirt.
“God was good to us, you know? When the killing was on, it was dry. When it stopped, the rainy season would start to wash all the blood away.”
In the ‘loyalist’ area (across the river from Al- pha Mike) with Commander Peanut Butter, the last general fighting for President Charles Taylor – with child soldiers too. “They’re not real children. These types have seen their family killed before their eyes and the ones who killed them didn’t even bother to take them away. Sometimes I can only think that I’m going to lose my mind. Why do I have to be here?”
“This guy showed up here in September, at a meeting we’d set up with LURD. I thought it was a meeting of Africans, and this huge white man shows up.
Excuse me? What are Americans doing here? It’s not tourism, I guarantee you.”
Logging in forest sanctuaries to fund the war: The prospector finally indicates the trunk he identified in a previous survey. His job ends there. The tree’s life – 20, 50, 100 years old, some even older – comes to an end as well. Two men approach the tree. The tree seems to hesitate for a second.
Then, the nerves of the wood make a breaching sound and the large tree leans and falls, falls, falls, first with a storm of leaves and then with a guttural noise of a whale splashing the surface of the sea.
Morie was the only survivor of an all-day- long massacre of his entire village (1200 people). We traced the boy down in the swamps of Pujehun in 2003 and later we visited his teenager persona: the trauma lives on and came of age…
Morie remembers this absurd detail of the massacre: «In the middle of the people, chickens, dogs, goats, all dead…»”
A group of women “tired of war, tired of having no voice,” has held weekly ecumenical demonstrations for peace at the airport.
“What we want?” “Peace!!!” “When?” “Now!!!”
One woman, apart from the group, falls to her knees and lies prostrate on the ground, trembling in a quiet, dry weeping. She murmurs names, and the names drive her to despair.
In the Bombuna Mountains, in a remote ghetto for amputees. Balá Cissé knows how to drink water as dogs do,“just with my mouth.” He learned how to do that when they cut off his hands and left him in the forest, fighting for life for seven days. His six friends were killed on the spot, immediately.
Cissé was shoved against a fence, where they extended his arms on top of the wood. When he saw the saber rise, Cissé screamed “Oh, God!!” They mocked him: “You have a god?” And the saber came down twice.
An evangelical institution for drug addicts in Freetown. Gospel exorcizes the addiction by force… “We have everything here, man.There are rastas, druggies, hippies, junkies, dreads, soldiers, rebels, thieves, murderers–”
Wyclin stops to assess the group around him.“You know, I don’t think I’m the worst of them.” And who is the worst? Wyclin glances at a man with an absorbed gaze, sitting in a chair, immobile in the middle of the courtyard.
“Well, man… It might be the devil…”
“The only hope for Liberia is for those gentlemen to be eliminated. Nothing else. My friends complain and lament that this here is a bloodbath.
And I say: yes, it is–the wrong bloodbath. Because there are so many correct bloodbaths. If the blood of one man prevents the blood of a thousand, that’s the right bloodbath.”
I want blood for blood. I don’t want justice.”
One long analysis on reporting violence and finding words for horror, when night falls back in “hotel” Florida –the ruins of a brothel, filthy with rats and roaches, run by an old Lebanese-, in the frontline of Monrovia.
On how to pierce out the thorns of the day, to retain only the elusive flowers – and keep on working next morning.“I did not, I did not…”
