THE PUBLIC INTEREST: Reporting From The Arab Spring Front – A Conversation with May Ying Welsh. In December 2010 a wave of demonstrations and protests erupted across the Arab world beginning in Tunisia, then continuing on to Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, Yemen and Syria. May Ying Welsh is a journalist and filmmaker for Al Jazeera English stationed in Doha, Qatar. On assignment, Welsh covered the recent referendum for independence in the Sudan, producing the 23-minute documentary DEGREES OF SEPARATION. She has covered the Tuareg rebellion in the deserts of Niger and Mali and most recently, the populist movement for democracy in Bahrain, often working alone and at great risk.
She was cinematographer on Eugene Jarecki’s 2005 award winning documentary WHY WE FIGHT and ANCESTORS IN THE AMERICAS, PART II directed by her late mother, the pioneer Asian American filmmaker Loni Ding.
THE PUBLIC INTEREST brings Welsh to AAIFF’11 for a conversation with Vinit Parmar, Professor of Film Studies and Production at Brooklyn College and the U.S. premiere of BAHRAIN: SHOUTING IN THE DARK. Welsh remaining in Pearl Roundabout in Manama Bahrain after the government banned foreign journalists, documented the civil uprising and subsequent government crackdown collaborating with local activists. Welsh recently received the prestigious 2011 Polk George Polk Awards in Journalism.
This transcript will be uploaded in three parts.
The Public Interest, Part 1 – Beginnings, Al Jazeera, Sudan
Professor Vinit Parmar: Thank you. So, you grew up in California and then you came to New York, Doha, Qatar and Al Jazeera how did that happen?
May-Ying Welsh: I started out working for Paper Tiger TV with Dee Dee Halleck, who my mom Loni Ding kind of directed me to. I can’t remember what the connection was exactly, but Loni knew some people here in New York in the filmmaking community. And I started working with Paper Tiger TV. I don’t know how many people here know what Paper Tiger TV is; it’s kind of dissecting the media, analyzing the corporate ownership of media and how that might affect how they cover things, so it’s kind of like a media analysis sort of television show we did every week. And that got me interested in international affairs. Living in New York, you get a lot of opportunities to travel and do videos just to get more and more experience. At some point I realized I was interested in journalism. I then became more interested in the Middle East because I could see that maybe for the previous generation, the interest might have been in Southeast Asia because we were interfering in Vietnam. For my generation, the interest would more be in Iraq and in the Middle East because that’s where we were focusing our foreign adventurism. So I got interested in the Middle East because of our foreign policy to some extent, and the desire to tell the other side of the story; to give Arabs and people from the Middle East a chance to say what they thought about what we’re doing over there and just to learn more about the region for myself as an American.
VP: So you were in Rome for a while then you went to Cairo to study Arabic.
MYW: Right. I went to Rome freelancing for CNN, just trying to collect as much experience as I could get. I wanted to work for a big company, so I could know the right way to fit in that kind of environment. Then at a certain point I decided I wanted to break out and author my own stuff, which you’re not gonna do at CNN. You know, you’ll always be low on the totem poll and it would take years and years to make your way up– so I went to Cairo to study Arabic to be able to understand people and to have conversations in-depth without always asking someone to help me understand what is going on. I felt that having the language skills would be essential to doing a real, in-depth, proper job as opposed to just relying on translators to understand the culture and the people.
VP: So by the time you’re with CNN, you’re an editor and then you gravitated to other fields.
MYW: I was shooting; I was editing at CNN. And then I started doing my own work when I left CNN.
VP: Freelancing…
MYW: Yeah, freelancing…
VP: Your film school, so of speak, your training, really started way back. I mean, you were growing up with an Emmy-award winning filmmaker Loni Ding. She made films like ANCESTORS IN AMERICA and so many others that were on PBS. She was the first Asian filmmaker to have a public television program on PBS and she was a founder of Center for Asian American Media.
MYW: Co-founder.
VP: Yes, co-founder. She also helped found ITVS, major stuff.
MYW: Yeah, my film school started when I was like three years old because my mom was already making television. I know I absorbed a lot from my mom. She is very dogged and persistent and determined; and she knew exactly what she wanted. She would make you do a thousand takes on something if that’s what it took to get what she wanted. When I was about eight my mom was making a children’s show called BEAN SPROUTS and I was one of the kids on the show. So I was watching my mom direct all of us, and directing the camera people and all of that.
VP: So growing up she made films about trying to defeat the Asian American stereotypes, social reform films, a humanitarian focus–how did that frame the kind of focus you began to make as a filmmaker.
MYW: One of the more important films she made was NISEI SOLDIER and the second one THE COLOR OF HONOR. Those films were instrumental in helping Japanese Americans get reparations–an apology and monetary reparations for being interned in concentration camps during World War II. Those two films were used in congressional hearings, so that would be one thing that influenced me for sure seeing that films can change the world, films can implement social justice.
VP: How old were you at the time she made those films?
MYW: I was 12 when she did that. I was really conscious of what my mom was doing, she was determined to give other people a voice. Her films were not about the narrator, her films were about letting other people have the voice—them being heard, and I think it’s what Asian CineVision is doing and what CAAM is doing: letting people have their own voice instead of being framed by others. That’s one thing my mom pioneered. When my mom first started making television in the 70’s, there were very few people of color working in television. She was one of the first Asian Americans.
VP: Let’s jump to now Sudan. Earlier you mentioned how you as a filmmaker are seeing the world in terms of unity, sameness. What you took away from your element as an Asian American was to find something like that in Sudan. Why Sudan?
MYW: Sudan is, or was before the breakup of Sudan, the largest country in Africa. It’s considered a microcosm of Africa because it has so many different tribes, it has so many different climates and it has Muslims and Christians. All the things you find in Africa are found in Sudan. It’s a crossroads because of the Nile and because of the nomadic Arab tribes and Black African tribes from the South who follow their animals throughout the country following the rains. It’s a place where peoples meet, where different tribes are forced to meet in this crossroad and decide whether they are going to integrate with one another, they are going to fight with one another, or if they are going to coexist. It’s an extraordinary country. The first time I went there, I started to see that; my fascination with it just grew the more times I went.
VP: So let’s take a quick look. What we’re going to see is a 5-minute opening sequence…
MYW: This film is called DEGREES OF SEPARATION because Sudan just broke up. Sudan was having a civil war for more than 40 years–more years than Sudan has been a country. It was in civil war between the Black Africans of the South and the Arab Africans of the North. The big question on the table after the 2005 comprehensive peace agreement was: is this country gonna separate or stay together? So, all of the issues: race, tribe, and religion, came out at that moment when people had to decide: are we going to live together? This film was kind of an exploration along the Nile of the elements that are driving Sudanese people apart and at the same time bringing them together.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYXdFUbj_a8[/youtube]
VP: Can you tell us how you got into this story… some of the logistics of it, how long you spent in Sudan?
MYW: This part of the film goes deeper and deeper into Sudan, down the Nile into different parts of Sudan and some very hairy situations. Towards the end, the film takes you into a place where hundreds of women and little girls have been raped, some of them killed. It explores different themes of race and tribe and ultimately the conclusion that I came to is that it’s not a matter of Arabs vs. Blacks in Sudan; it’s actually a matter of tribe versus tribe and the politicians who use the tribes to get power or to get influence, who pit them against one another. So the barge that you see in this clip, me and my friend Abdul Aziz Ibrahim rode it down the Nile River stopping and exploring the stories in each of these different places. This is a cargo ship, it didn’t have any place to sleep so you just had to sleep on top of the deck with the people. There were no bathrooms, people just peed in a bucket and threw it over the side. And if you didn’t have food, you wouldn’t eat. It was kind of a cool experience to be there with all the Southerners going back home. It was the rainy season and when it rains, it’s a torrential rain, and there’s no place to hide. You, and everything you own will be soaked. I didn’t have a camera for several days because it just died from the rain. We went into the Shilluk Kingdom by small boat and had to walk for days through swamps where there’s no proper soil to walk on, to get to some of these stories. Sometimes the water came up to here. And there were leeches and all kinds of insects—I don’t like worms. We had leeches sucking our blood and we’re walking for days without anything to drink or anything to eat. When you finally got to a location where there would be civilians, the water they had collected, it’s for them. If you’re drinking it, you’re depriving them of it, so it was a tough time.
VP: Especially because these people were dislocated, right?
MYW: Yeah, in the Shilluk Kingdom there was a rebellion going on there. Because there are many rebellions going on in Sudan, and often, they’re supported by different proxies and forces. This rebellion was a Shilluk tribal rebellion against the Dinka dominated government of the South. The Dinka is the dominant tribe of Southern Sudan. What the Dinka dominated government did was go in to punish all the Shilluk. They went in and burned all the villages in the kingdom, maybe 25 villages were burned to the ground. And they raped all the women in these villages, even girls that were so small, toddlers were raped—mass rapes went on. I had done some research and I knew I would find something in the Shilluk Kingdom that wasn’t gonna be pretty, I just didn’t know how bad it was. Things got worse and worse as you go down the Nile and you go deeper into the story of this country.
When I got there, I discovered that a prominent American human rights organization, which I will not name here, knew all about it. I knew they knew about it because all the same people I had spoken to had told me they had spoken to them and because the United Nations told me they had given them all the information that they had. I innocently called the woman who was in charge of that particular project and said hey, I’m coming out with a film about this issue. What are you guys doing? Maybe we can host you as a guest on Al Jazeera to talk about what you discovered. She just told me on the phone they were not going to cover this issue, were not gonna do anything about it; not gonna write a report, not gonna publicize it. When I asked why, the woman from the human rights organization said she didn’t think it was politically correct to talk about the mass burning of villages and mass rape of hundreds of women and girls in these villages because the atrocities had been committed by the government of the South, not by the government of the North, which is continuously targeted. Blacks had committed these atrocities against other Blacks. It wasn’t a story of any interest and it might even undermine the foundation of this new Southern state, which I thought was really incredible. I mean, something is a human rights abuse or it’s not a human rights abuse, not I decide if something is worthy of reporting it based on whom it hurts.
VP: The clip in her film explores this issue: women talk about the rapes, the burnt huts she documented it in her film, you can view it on YouTube. And as you’re going through this, what’s going on in your mind, as you are the only filmmaker here?
MYW: Yeah, it was an amazing feeling walking through these forests and swamps finding these people that were in the middle of the forest surviving on rainwater and leaves. I really felt this terrible sense of responsibility because I’m the only person who’s come here. Not one article was written in the entire world about what happened there. Not one article. George Clooney was over in Abyei whining about some very small human rights abuses compared to what this was. ABC News was doing news specials only miles away from this incident. I felt strongly, I had to do something for these people, I have to make sure their voices are heard because they didn’t ask me for anything. These people when you meet them, they don’t ask you for money, they don’t ask you for anything material at all; they just want you to listen to them and want you to tell somebody about what happened to them. And I feel like working at Al Jazeera, I had a lot of opportunities, thank God, to actually give a voice to people who aren’t being listened to by anybody.
VP: So you had a camera? Did you have any helpers with you as you’re going along?
MYW: I had a drunk speedboat captain with me and my colleague and friend Aziz who was accompanying me on this trip; I felt I didn’t need to be a woman traveling alone in Sudan. He’s Arab from the tribe of Omar Bashir, the president. Sudan was always a very tribal place. Everywhere in the South, people are suspicious of the North. Everyone would take one look at Aziz and ask “what’s your tribe?” Then he’d have to admit he’s from Bashir’s tribe, and they’d be like “ehh” and then they’d be looking at me wondering “what are you really doing here? What’s your agenda?” At a certain point, both of us decided he had to stay in the hotel. So when I went to the Shilluk Kingdom to do this story, I had to go by myself because these people weren’t even gonna talk to me if he was there. So I had an alcoholic speedboat driver who took me there, and translated from Shilluk to Arabic, it was all a very shaky affair. And then on top of that, you had the demands of television, where you ask horrible things and you feel like a monster. You have to say to them things like “Okay, so you were raped by five men, and they were soldiers from SPLA? Can you just repeat that as a complete sentence?” I did have to ask these horrific, stupid sounding, awful questions–monstrous things you have to end up doing sometimes when you’re working for television. Luckily, the women were really determined to be heard, so they would do it. Later on, I found someone to review the material and give me a proper translation to make sure the drunk speedboat captain had not given me a bum steer.
VP: So you have a camera? You’re a woman in a Muslim country, an African country… how are they gonna take you seriously? Will they take you seriously?
MYW: Yeah, I feel like I’ve been treated pretty well actually. I feel like being a woman has been an advantage for me because if I was a male, especially if I was a white male, I would have been considered extremely suspicious. Being a female makes me less threatening so people were more welcoming, allowing me into their homes. First of all, to allow me into their homes period because it’s always okay for a woman to enter a house filled with women, but it’s never okay for a man to enter a woman’s area so I’m always able to move everywhere. My camera is my license to go to all places, if I didn’t have that camera, I wouldn’t have been allowed. So I feel being a woman has been extremely helpful.
Audience: Did they pitch you this story, how did you …?
MYW: Yeah, I pitched it. I did the research and I pitched it to them. They agreed to it because they wanted to do a lot of stuff on Sudan on the eve of the independence to help people understand it better. In the Arab world, Sudan is a huge deal—it’s the most African-Arab country and it’s a clash of civilizations. It’s thought of as a part of the Arab world by many people and as a part of Africa by many other people. To me, it’s both. Al Jazeera wanted people to think more about Sudan, to talk more about Sudan. And it’s not a story you would see CNN focusing on because who cares about Africa? To Al Jazeera, this is a point of focus.
VP: What we’ve seen is somewhat a little like reporting because you’re constantly talking. But by the time you get to the middle of the film and by the time you get to the end of the film, it’s a film. It’s not a journalistic spiel. How did you go from a journalist to becoming a filmmaker?
MYW: I’m a filmmaker posing as a journalist, actually.
VP: Fantastic.
MYW: What I wanna do is make films, and I’m using journalism to do it because they pay. Filmmaking is this profession where you always ask for money and you’re working in isolation whereas journalists work in institutions–you’re not in isolation and you have access to the resources. I am a journalist, but I’m using the news genre to do more.
VP: When you’re on the ground talking to these people, did you represent yourself as a journalist from Al Jazeera? How did you gain the credibility? How did you gain their trust?
MYW: Yeah, that’s another positive aspect to working for a company like Al Jazeera is that when you say you work for Al Jazeera, this name in the Arab world in particular in Africa has huge huge significance. It’s like if you go some place in America and say I’m with CNN, everybody immediately understands that the whole world is going to see this. Same thing in the Arab world. If you say Al Jazeera, a lot of people want to help you. They certainly don’t want to look bad in front of you, so all of that helps me. It also helps me be safe because I was alone with rebels for days, not only in this film but on many occasions, alone with huge numbers of armed males. And the only reason I felt safe in any way, was because I had the shield of Al Jazeera. You know, who’s gonna do something bad to me; tomorrow, it will be all over Al Jazeera.
VP: So moving on, you said that you had conducted research. What had inspired you specifically about Sudan?
MYW: Yeah, like I said before, Sudan is this gigantic, amazing country, a microcosm of Africa. It’s a place where tribes and people come together and are going to choose to coexist, fight, or integrate. I really like that about the country because it’s a rich territory for exploring these themes. And also I felt for bringing people together with the films or videos by exploring the sameness between them. One report was about the Sudanese thobe, this long bolt of fabric, like a sari or like a toga. It’s a fashion that is loved by all Sudanese women, North and South, East and West–I did a story about that. I try to do something non-divisive.
VP: Right, and these are wonderful metaphors that are used; one of the visual metaphors you used in the film, right?
MYW: Yeah, the river, the animal migrations, bird migrations, just trying to show that Sudan is a continuum and the people are a continuum. These divisions are actually artificial, they’re generated for many ugly reasons, where they are exacerbated.
VP: And of course, you know at the end, she ends on a wonderful note about this man on the river, floating on the Nile as he find his home. If you want to talk to us a little bit about what he said and how you end the film.
MYW: The main problem I see in Sudan, just my personal opinion, is that Sudan doesn’t have any strong nationalist leaders who managed to unite everybody under a banner of nationalism. They try to put labels on the country like we’re an Arab country or Islamic country, without actually including people without corruption, and stealing resources for certain tribes and groups. I think that’s where things went wrong. But at the end this old man, a Dinka–the majority of the South, the Black African Dinka tribe–had lived in the North since the 70’s. He spoke very broken Arabic which is a sign the man spent more than 30 years living in Northern Sudan and never managed to integrate with the country. He told me he had been ghettoized and was mostly living in a Dinka slum doing low-level jobs like cleaning up and building and stuff like that. He was a man who had gone to Northern Sudan from the South as a young man believing in the country and after 30 years came home disillusioned.
The Public Interest, Part 2 – Pearl Roundabout, Bahrain will be posted in two weeks.