Dirt for Dinner

Sam Meffire is one of those documentary subjects crying out for movie treatment. To begin at the end, he's currently serving ten years for a number of armed robberies committed with his partners in a security firm. Only a year or two earlier - in his early 20s - he'd been Saxony's most famous policeman, held up as a model of East German multiculturalism and integration in a national advertising campaign, interviewed by reporters at home and abroad. See, Meffire is the son of a (white) German and a (black) Cameroon - a Cameroon, moreoever, who died claiming he had been poisoned by his fellow students. Okpako's TV doc interviews friends and reporters (often one and the same, as everyone he met seems to have befriended him) and exposes the intolerable pressures on a young man growing up German and black without parental support.