Lech Szporer

The Gambia Project (The Gambia & Senegal, 2020)

The Gambia Project (The Gambia & Senegal, 2020)

The Gambia Project is the story of reuniting a father with his son after having been separated by involuntary migration.

During this project, we also started an ongoing independent historical and geographical analysis of the Gambia River and Kunta Kinteh Island (formerly James Island) and a sociological analysis of the tourism industry in West Africa in the hopes of better understanding the history of The Gambia, colonialism, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, migration, and neocolonialism. Much of this research has been documented and will be released in our forthcoming feature film.

Reuniting Father & Son/Mame´s Prayer (Kerr Ndongo, The Gambia, 2020)

Over the months of February and March 2020, we helped reunite Abdou Touray, a West African formerly-undocumented refugee and immigration activist living in Madrid, Spain, with his 7 year old son, Mame Touray, and his family in The Gambia after 6 years of horror, separation, and struggle.

Abdou ended up in Europe the hard way, and not by choice. While escaping the former dictator of The Gambia, over the course of 6 years, he survived the deadly Sahara desert, from kidnappings and forced labor and dodging terrorist insurgencies and the Libyan war to nearly dying in the Mediterranean Sea – only to make it to Europe to be discarded from country to country and from prison to the streets in search of asylum.

But Abdou endured. He studied languages and worked as many under-the-table jobs as he could. He organized with other African immigrants. And against all seeming odds, as Vice President of Sidicato de Manteros de Madrid (a grassroots Street Vendors Union), as a restaurant chef, as a commercial model, and as an associate producer for Tactical Aesthetics, he received Spanish residency papers in February of 2020. Weeks later we flew from Spain to The Gambia to surprise his son and to join his family during their annual ceremony.

Acknowledgements: This project would not have been possible without my international film crew including David Sabate from Spain, William Pena from Colombia, Babou Mbaye from The Gambia, and with a heavy heart, our driver and production assistant Alie Touray (Allah bless his name and may he rest in peace).