The Dream Team

Some people grow up wanting to be filmmakers. I grew up in Niger, West Africa, with a broken camera.

When I was twelve, my best friend gave me a vintage Kodak. His father had brought it back from Senegal in the sixties. I couldn’t afford the $2 film rolls to use it — but I’d hold it for hours, listening to the shutter release in the empty chamber, studying the fonts on the yellow and orange Kodak logo. Something about it stayed with me.

Years later, living in New York City, I discovered filmmaking through my roommate Micah Schaeffer — a student at NYU Tisch. I bought a Mac, a copy of Final Cut Pro 5, and some training books. I taught myself to edit.

I went to business school. Spent six years as a senior tax analyst on Wall Street. Then I made a decision: I left finance to attend the George Washington University Documentary Institute, where I completed Life in Strides — an 18-minute documentary about Jake Luoma, a young man on the autism spectrum who found freedom on horseback.

Since 2016, I’ve been filming across Africa, the Middle East, and the United States. In July 2022, I founded AmeriFilms in Dayton, Ohio — to build something that tells real stories, for real organizations, with the same discipline I carried from Wall Street and the same eye I’ve been developing since I first held that broken Kodak.

I’m Souley Oumarou. This is the work.