Ruhi Hamid: Filming in dangerous places
What does a journalist need to know when going to film in dangerous places?
If you are going to any kind of conflict zone you have to become risk aware. You have to calculate what your risks are likely to be. So whether it is your safety from suicide bombing, kidnapping, being caught in cross fire, being caught up in a hostile environment in terms of people’s hostility, a local neighborhood where they don’t like to see the camera and they get angry with you. So, what you have to do, on any trip, you have to really plan what the consequences are likely to be .You always have to ask the question, what if? So, what if there is a bomb what will I do? What if we have a car accident and one of us gets injured what will I do? So before you go I think you have to consider the environment you are going into and then once you are, there, there are practical things like, you have to choose your driver very carefully, you have to make sure that this is a driver that is been approved by some agency there , or through recommendation .It is the same thing with the fixer , or your translator .Because I work alone ,I rely heavily on a driver and my translator , and so I make sure I pick them very carefully because a lot of the time my safety depends on them.
Your are the reporter, the editor, the cameraman, all at one. Is that helpful or is it more difficult?
Is a combination of both? It is helpful in that it allows me to be a lot more discrete. The kind of stories I do, are usually more intimate stories, so they are more domestic environments. So what it allows me to do is go there on my own, quietly, make the contact with the people, built up the relationship. And because I do the camera myself as well, it allows the camera to be just an extension of me, and so the character doesn’t see it. So in that way it is an advantage. The disadvantage is that I don’t have anyone looking behind me, and I don’t have that kind of support. But in a way, because of the kind of films I make it doesn’t matter because I don’t need a big team with me. It just frees me to do the kind of films that I want to make.
You said in the panel, that you always try to find how to make your stories affective to the people. And I would like to know, what is that you are thinking when trying to make a story affective?
When I say affective, what I mean is: How can I get the message across of what this person is, what their life is like? So do I do it by getting them to tell the story? Do I do it by shooting certain kind of shots? In my head, I am always constructing how this can come across to an audience. What is she saying? How can I express that visually? So, my paramount thing is, I want the audience in Britain to feel as if they were there with me. So I try to take the camera everywhere that I think an audience in Britain would want to see or needs to see, in order to understand the full story. My eye and my hurt becomes the audience in Britain, what would they be looking for. When I ask a question I actually ask really simple questions. I don’t ask clever journalist kind of questions. I will ask a simple question like:”When that happened to you how you did feel? Or did it make you angry?” So I don’t say “The situation here when the man was very violent to you , weren’t you angry that he was abusing you ?” I want them to tell me their story and what that often does is that it brings out something that I didn’t even imagine, I didn’t even expect because I don’t really know her story until I ask her the question in a very open way .I won’t know what the details of the story is . And once I hear those details, my story, and my film changes. So my film is always changing according to what I am seeing. And I think that is the only way that I feel I reflect the truth. By allowing by self to be as open and to just be curious. The important thing is to be curious and to want to know. And once I’ve got that I know I will get good material for film that will work for a British audience as well.
In this festival there has been some discussion about embedded journalism. Diego Bunuel , who I have spoken with, said that in news embedded journalism is not useful when you do news , but can bring in surface interesting stories , when you are doing features and documentaries, because people start to open up after the first week . I would like to know what your thoughts on that are.
I guess what I do is I embed myself in communities or in peoples worlds, so for instance in the film that I showed in the festival I went there three times in a period of five months. So every time I went people were welcoming me back as a sister or friend and the more I spend time with them, the more I got. Because they do forget the camera is there. The first week people are on their guard, and they now that the camera is here and they are performing for you. But after a while they forget about the camera, because you become a part of their world. I think it is slightly different though, when it is news people and in a war situation, to be embedded with the army because the army is going to control what you see. But even then, the camera is very good at capturing the reality. Just by turning the camera slightly to the right, is going to give you something. So even though they have brought you and they tell you that is where the battle is, this is what you are looking at, you can easily turn your camera slightly to the right, and you will get something, a detail that will tell you a lot more. So again, it depends, on you at the end of the day. It doesn’t matter whether you are embedded, whether you are independent. It all depends on how use your camera, and how you use your mind and your heart, to determine what it is that you film, and how you tell your story.
Being a woman, does it make it more difficult for you to tell your stories in conflict zones?
In many ways is easier because they don’t expect you to be there so they don’t see you as a threat .I feel that as a woman, I get away with everything because they don’t see me as a threat. If there is anything terrible happening, I will smile at them and talked to them, and especially if it is men they just completely come down. If I was a man there be much more of the macho camaraderie between them, and they would be like coax fighting. For me it is easy and I can be a lot more discrete because I am not what people expect. Also when I am filming in Pakistan , Afghanistan , India ,or Africa – I grew up in Africa so I know Africa very well, I know Pakistan because my origins are in Pakistan and I speak the language . Speaking the language, being of the same skin color, and when I am there I dress as much as possible like the locals that immediately makes me acceptable, and culturally I know the culture so again I can be much more sensitive. So I know when to step back and I know when to push. Because I know what this cultures are like.
Tania Georgoupli
