P.O.V. "Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars"

- Refugee Camps of War-Torn West Africa Give Birth to True Band of Survivors: Six Musicians -

"It's as easy to fall in love with these guys as it was with the Buena Vista Social Club."

- Vanessa Juarez, Newsweek

The plight of the refugee in today's war-torn world is captured in the African proverb, "When two elephants are fighting, the grass will suffer." So it was in Sierra Leone from 1991-2002, when the government and various rebel factions carried on a brutal civil war in which the terrorizing of civilians - through killing, mutilation, rape and forced conscription - was common practice on all sides. The war sent hundreds of thousands of ordinary Sierra Leoneans fleeing to refugee camps in the neighboring West African nation of the Republic of Guinea. That's where the remarkable story told by the new P.O.V. documentary "Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars" began.

Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars are a band of six Sierra Leonean musicians who have been living in Guinea. Despite the unimaginable horrors of civil war, they were saved through their music. Zach Niles and Banker White's "Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars," airing Tuesday, June 26, 2007, 10:00-11:30 p.m. ET (check local listings) on PBS as part of the 20th anniversary season of P.O.V., American television's longest-running independent documentary series, chronicles the band over three years, from Guinean refugee camps back to war-ravaged Sierra Leone, where they realize the dream of recording their first studio album. So begins a musical phenomenon that is making the world hear the voices of West Africa's refugees, while drawing the accolades of Keith Richards, Paul McCartney, Ice Cube (one of the film's executive producers) and Joe Perry.

Walking with his wife, Grace, through the squalid and dangerous Kalia Camp in Guinea, Reuben Koroma was happy to find Franco John Langba, a "musical brother" from the pre-war music scene in Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital. In camps like Kalia, finding a friend alive feels like a miracle, but the three took the miracle a step further by making music for their fellow refugees. The camp had already become embroiled in Guinea's fractious politics, and soon the unwanted Sierra Leoneans were relocated to Sembakounya in the remote countryside. It was there that Reuben, Grace and Franco were joined by three other refugee musicians and acquired beat-up instruments and a rusted-out sound system.

At Sembakounya Camp, the newly formed Refugee All Stars, led by Reuben, had another fortuitous encounter - with American filmmakers Zach Niles and Banker White and their musical director Chris Velan. The filmmakers, both living in San Francisco, had previously had substantial experience in Africa and were in Guinea looking for stories that would balance the Western media's focus on the region's violence with a sense of African society's beauty and resilience.

When they were introduced to the All Stars, Niles and White knew they had found their story. That was in August 2002, and the band was just preparing, under the auspices of the U.N. refugee agency, to tour other refugee camps in Guinea. The filmmakers followed the All Stars on that tour - where they were wildly received - and over the following three years, as the members worked on their songs, wrestled with the lasting traumas of the war and ultimately returned to Freetown, under an uneasy peace settlement, to record their first album, Living Like a Refugee.

Despite all the recent hoopla in the group's life, including a tour of music festivals throughout Europe, North America and Japan, the band and its music remain close to the reality of the camps that gave them life. The songs on Living Like a Refugee, including the title track, "Bull to the Weak," "Weapon Conflict" and "Compliments for Peace," speak directly from the refugees' experience, against war and the hatred, greed and brutality that accompany it.

As "Sierra Leone's Refugee All Stars" so vividly reveals, no amount of Western entertainment glitz could sweep away the pain and terror that gave the band its soul and which, paradoxically, led to buoyant, hopeful and even joyous music. With its own blend of traditional Sierra Leonean goombay, West African high-life, reggae and hip-hop, the All Stars are bonded by the determination to do no less than "take the suffering of the people and make a song of it." In this there is no distance between them and their subject - the suffering is indelibly their own.

In the camps, Reuben and Grace, who fled Freetown in the midst of a rebel attack, had one another, but had lost everything else, including contact with family, friends and the musical life they had known.

Franco had been separated from his wife and kids and had still not been able to learn anything of their fate. Of the other band mates, Arahim "Jah Voice," so called for his perfect high pitches, was forced to watch as rebels killed his father; they cut off Arahim's arm and left him for dead. Mohammed Bangura had been forced to watch the murder of his parents, wife and infant child before his hand was severed. Alhadji Jeffrey Kamara, called "Black Nature," at 15 is the youngest of the group. Orphaned by the war and tortured by police in Guinea, where he had fled, Black Nature is perhaps the most traumatized; he is considered an "adopted son" by the others.

Yet it is in such grace notes - in the warmth, humor and searing candor with which the band members bear their personal and collective wounds - as well as in the music they make, that the All Stars express their fierce loyalty to each other and to their people, and indeed to refugees of all the world's terrible conflicts. They must face the present with courage and the future with hope in order to save their lives. Thus the band's return to a barely reconstructed Island Studios in Freetown, while the devastation and a shaky peace treaty signed in 2002 keep many refugees away, comes as a powerful message of renewal.

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