I was working for a radio station that was doing a series of festival reviews and for some reason I’ll never fully understand but I suspect was a tax dodge, decided to cover the Panafrican Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou (FESPACO).

Ouagadougou is the capital of Burkina Faso, in West Africa.

So I went along to do interviews, get soudbytes, watch a bunch of movies and write reviews.

That alone was pretty fucking awesome. But then I was having a drink at a bar and heard some Australian accents, so I went up to chat to them. Turns out they were part of a crew filming a doco and they’d lost their producer. I had minimal production experience, but I was there and I spoke English and French.

So I called work & told them I wouldn’t be back for awhile, and ended up staying in West Africa for another 3 months producing a doco on modern-day slavery in West Africa.