On June 11, the day of the premiere of the Max platform, Martyna Wojciechowska's documentary “Hope” was added to the website's library. The axis of the film is the story of a Nigerian boy named Hope, saved from death by Anja Ringgren Lovén.
In 2016, Anja Ringgren Lovén became famous after a photo of her saving a starving 2-year-old Nigerian child hit the Internet. The boy, later named Hope by Anja and her husband David, was accused of witchcraft and abandoned by his family. Severely malnourished, he had to wait a long time for help to arrive.
In Nigeria, one of the poorest and most famine-stricken countries in the world, superstitions are part of everyday life. This is often how misfortunes and accidents are explained. For people living in extreme poverty and deprived of the opportunity for education, accusations of witchcraft are an excuse to reduce the number of household members to support. People accused of witchcraft, often small children, are abandoned by their families and left without support.
In the documentary “Hope” we learn about the extraordinary life of Anja Ringgren Lovén, a Danish humanitarian worker and founder of The Land of Hope, an organization that rescues and shelters children accused of witchcraft, where there are currently over ninety of them. Hope is one of them. Viewers will have the chance to learn about his fate and see his first meeting with his biological mother.
The narrator of the story is Martyna Wojciechowska, who waited over seven years to meet and get to know Anja. Will this extraordinary woman, who divides her life between Africa and Europe, manage to break the evil spell cast on Nigeria?