About a year ago, I posted a piece on this blog about a documentary film called Les Martyrs du Golfe d'Aden by the heroic film maker Daniel Grandclement. He risked his life to depict the plight of the Somalians who risk their lives for the chance to escape and get to Yemen by paying for passage on tiny boats across the Gulf of Aden.They are treated like animals and many never make it across the Gulf. The boat owners will kill them if they think they are in danger. When they do get to Yemen, the reality is as bleak as the one they left.
Grandclement made the trip and filmed it clandestinely and created this harrowing documentary.
At the time, we were interested in getting it to a larger audience. It has been shown here in France on the France3 network a few times on the television show about the seas, Thalassa. We were able to obtain a dvd copy by writing to France3.
Meanwhile, in the year since I posted the piece, I realized that it had become the single most googled piece I had written. Then in the last few days, I noticed that I had hundreds of hits on this blog referencing the piece.
I recieved an email from an Ethiopian News Agency who wanted to find a copy to show as an educational tool, to warn those who were planning to try to go to Yemen by this dangerous method.
I tried to get as much info to them as possible and today, I noticed that a website called ipetitions.com had published my review of the movie along with the entire documentary which opens automatically and plays well even on my extremely cranky ancient iMac. The documentary is about 58 minutes long, but the video plays well without any stalling. Unfortunately, the audio is in the original French and it has subtitles in a language that I still am not sure of. None the less, if you do speak French, the entire video is there to view and if you don't, the story is plainly told and the images are chilling.
This is a great documentary which deserves a greater audience!
1 comment:
Good work microdot.
Your post is a prime example of how the internet can be a vehicle for information that educates.
Regrettably, we have all been the recipients of some piece of misinformation that was thoughtless forwarded to us by a well meaning acquaintance who failed to check it provenance b/f hitting the send button. "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to put its pants on." (Attributed to Winston Churchill but I have just spent 20 minutes tying to find this quote in a primary source and have not be successful. More on this later.)
Anyway, Bravo.
TLGK
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