Skye Fitzgerald is a two-time Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker, his films include Hunger Ward, Lifeboat, and 50 Feet from Syria. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
Skye's Twitter: https://twitter.com/spin_film
Skye's Instagram: https://instagram.com/spin_film
Hunger Ward (movie): https://hungerward.org
Lifeboat (movie): https://lifeboatdocumentary.com
50 Feet from Syria (movie): https://50feetfromsyria.com

PODCAST INFO:
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Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8
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Full episodes playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOdP_8GztsuKi9nrraNbKKp4
Clips playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrAXtmErZgOeciFP3CBCIEElOJeitOr41

OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:00 - World hunger
7:03 - Hunger Ward
29:30 - Language
34:41 - Famine
45:25 - Authoritarianism
51:53 - Storytelling
1:05:27 - Access
1:09:50 - Trust
1:13:32 - Film equipment
1:18:18 - Editing
1:24:47 - Filmmaking
1:37:46 - Favorite Films
1:48:54 - Lifeboat
1:56:19 - Breaking rules
1:59:14 - Fear
2:02:53 - 50 feet from Syria
2:07:50 - Money and distribution
2:15:28 - Advice for young people
2:18:33 - Books
2:20:27 - Darkest moments
2:24:58 - Meaning of life
2:26:56 - Mortality

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We would come up to these rafts and these boats that were in really dire shape, and people would be pushed off, and people would jump off, and people would fall into the water, and some of them couldn't swim.

And so we found ourselves in this moment where we had a choice.

We could film someone drowned in front of us, or we could put our cameras down and pull them out of the water.

The following is a conversation with Sky Fitzgerald, a two-time Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker who made the films Hunger Ward, about the war in Yemen, Lifeboat, about the search and rescue operations off the coast of Libya, and 50 Feet From Syria, about the war in Syria.

To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, dear friends, here's Sky Fitzgerald.

Nearly 811 million people worldwide are hungry today and 45 million people are on the edge of famine across 43 countries.

How do you make sense of that many people suffering from hunger and famine in the world today?

I don't know if I can make sense of it, Lex.

I mean, I think it's deeply disturbing to me that as a global community we've allowed this number of people to go hungry when the food to feed them exists and the resources to feed them exists.

I think the thing that disturbs me most about those figures is that many of those who are starving today or going hungry today are the net result of war and intentional acts by leaders to starve entire populations.

And that's the most deeply disturbing part to me.

You know your history, and we all know that, you know, deeply embedded in the Geneva Conventions post-World War II, the intent of 1 of those articles was to ban the use of starvation as a weapon of war because of what Hitler did during World War II.

That's been reiterated multiple times over the years in international humanitarian law, including in 2018 because of the Saudi blockade over Yemen.

And yet, to this day, starvation as a weapon of war continues to be used in Ethiopia, obviously in Ukraine right now, and in Yemen with the blockade over the country.

And that disgusts me, that the law is in place, but it won't be enforced by the international bodies and the nation states that make up the international community.

So the starvation is a result of human actions, human decisions, that's especially painful to make sense of.

I think that if you and I, sitting here, didn't eat for 3 days, and had to, you know, lay our head on the sidewalk for a couple nights, I think we would take, you know, hunger and homelessness a lot more seriously.

And I think that's, for some reason that's missing at this moment in history, tragically.

And I think until we can generate enough empathy that's immediate for all of us to understand what that means to go hungry.

I'm not sure we're gonna sort of marshal the global community to solve it.

It's fundamentally different, I think, because the thing that would be terrifying to me is not the fasting, but the hopelessness at the end of the fast.

Like, I wouldn't know when the next meal is coming.

I always had the freedom to have the meal.

The fear, not just your own ability to eat and survive, but your family's.

If there's loved ones, that's the other thing I don't have.

I'm single, so I feel like the worst suffering is watching somebody you love that you're supposed to be a caretaker of, and you can't take care of them.

And if all of that is caused by leaders as a weapon of war, that is especially painful.

Well, I think on the humanitarian front, we have to be aggressive and attentive and intervene in significant ways.

And I think on the political front, we have to hold players accountable for their actions.

So the leaders that start the war, so when you say we have to speak up about the decisions and the humans making those decisions that lead to the starvation.

So, you know, when I was, I don't wanna jump ahead, but when I was filming Hunger Ward in Yemen, you know, I met a mother who, when she gave birth, weighed 70 pounds, The mother weighed 70 pounds.

And so her daughter was starved in the womb.

When she was born, she was born into a world with no breast milk, very little formula.

She was born into a world with no breast milk, very little formula, right?

She was born into a world where she continued to be starved, right?

I watched that child, her name is Asila, die in front of me.

Asila had no chance for all those things we hope for, for a child in this world.

She didn't have a chance to grow up, she didn't have a chance to discover love, She didn't have a chance to have a career.

She was robbed of all of those things because of the insidious nature of hunger that she was born into.

Her mother was being starved because of the blockade over the country.

MBS in Saudi Arabia, with the reinforcement and sort of tacit approval of the United States, our own government here.

And so there are people who are responsible for the starvation of children, and I think we need to hold them accountable.

Now that's incredibly difficult to do, but just because it's difficult doesn't mean it ought not to be done.

And we'll talk about many cases like these throughout history and going on today.

You've been nominated for an Oscar twice.

This is 1 of the times for a documentary.

Can you please tell me what Hunger Ward, The Last Hope Between War and Starvation is about?

Hunger Ward is a short documentary that really is an attempt to illustrate the effects of the conflict on Yemen, specifically on civilians.

And we document it in, in both the North and the South of the country because it's a bifurcated country.

The South is held by the globally recognized government in the South, which up until last week was run by, at least on the surface, by President Hadi hold up in Riyadh.

He was essentially removed from office last week by, most people would agree, the Emiratis and the Saudis to put in place a presidential council.

So we wanted to show that starvation was happening in very similar fashions, both in the South and the North.

So, and we wanted to do this film because so few people in the West know anything about the conflict in Yemen, nor the US's complicity in it.

And so my intent with the project was try to bring it to a larger Western audience as an attempt to intervene and change the political status quo which allows the use of starvation in Yemen to continue.

Now, the world, unfortunately, cannot be painted in black and white of good guys and bad guys.

But for the purpose of conversation, who is causing suffering in the world in this situation?

And then of course, the roots of war go back in history.

Well, there are bad actors and there are less bad actors.

I mean, I think that's always the case in war, probably.

In the case of the status quo in Yemen right now.

And so the Saudi coalition, which is made up of primarily Saudi Arabia, the Emiratis, United States, France, Britain supplying weapons, but it's really driven and catalyzed by Saudi Arabia.

And it's asymmetrical to a great extent just because of the incredible firepower by air that the Saudis use continuously to pummel northern Yemen.

When I was there, the sheer volume of airstrikes is hard to describe, and we show the result of only 1 in the film, really.

The de facto authorities of the North, Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthi rebel group, they don't have an air force, right?

They have a drone force, but they don't have an air force.

And so from a military standpoint, it's completely asymmetrical.

The Saudis really don't commit troops to the ground.

They use only proxies to fight on the ground.

What is the narrative they use to justify a war?

Some of it is grounded in truth, some of it is not at all grounded in truth, also known as propaganda.

What's the narrative used by the Saudis for this war?

The Saudi line is essentially that the Houthis are an illegitimate government and that it's really a proxy war between Iran, who supports the Houthis nominally, and the rest of the world.

The reality is something altogether different.

While the Houthis do receive support from Iran, this is a war started by and sustained by MBS in Saudi Arabia.

He is the son of the ruler of Saudi Arabia.

Yes, he seized control of the country several years ago, even though he, on the surface, is not the ruler of Saudi Arabia.

And sorry to interrupt often, but who is he as a man?

Yeah, so I've never met him, and I likely will never meet him, hopefully.

But he is, I know a lot about him through his actions, sort of in the MENA region, Middle East and North Africa region.

And he is 1 of 3, in my view, as an American sitting here in the US, 3 people in the world that I think has caused such an incredible volume of misery and suffering and murder on this planet that I think if if you weren't around the world would be a lot better place.

And I'm not a violent person by nature, but there are 3 human beings that I think the world would be better off without.

Do you mind, before I ask other questions, mentioning the 3?

0 yeah, Assad is 1 in Syria, and that comes out of an earlier project that I did in Syria and Turkey, and what I saw Assad as a ruler do to his own people, and Putin would be the third.

Those 3 human beings are murderers on a scale beyond imagining.

are you able to think as a documentary filmmaker, as a human being, as a scholar, as a thinker, with an open mind about a man like that who does evil onto the world, and what that must feel like to be inside the mind of that man.

With most evil people, with all people probably, but with people who do evil onto the world, they think they're doing good.

Yeah, they're the hero of their own story.

And so to be able to place yourself, I feel like for me to understand a person, I have to literally, like the way actors kind of have to do, you know, live inside the body of the person they're trying to study.

So are you able to do that, or because you are also studying the people who suffer as a result, as a consequence of their actions, you just, you put them in a box and you say, I hate the person in that box.

This goes back to your black and white statement at the beginning, right?

It's like the world as a whole, of course, you know, is every gradation of gray, right?

And so I was trained long before I picked up a camera to inhabit other characters.

And so that level of sort of like walking in other people's shoes and trying to understand and empathize with their worldview is fundamental to how I live my life and how I do my work.

So in the case of those 3 that I named, Assad, MBS, and Putin, yeah, I can go there and think through how they came to be who they are, right?

And After I go through that process, I still don't think there's any way that 1 can justify what they've done.

We're going to talk about each of those people, for sure.

You're a human being, which makes you a partial expert on human nature, because nobody's an expert.

Anybody who actually carries a camera and listens and observe others isn't especially an expert of human nature.

It was willing to take that leap and truly understand somebody of any level, not leaders.

I feel like to understand a leader, you have to first understand humans.

And to understand humans, you have to see humans at their worst and their best, which is something that you've definitely done.

This lens that you've chosen to look at this is through a single, maybe you can speak to that.

You've mentioned the starvation as a result of war.

Like what is the lens you've chosen to give the world a peek at the results, at the suffering that's a result of this war?

People a lot of times will ask me after they've seen Hunger Ward, they ask where the hope is, right?

You read the byline earlier, The Last Hope.

What I try to focus on in many of my films, including Hunger Ward, is in the very difficult context of war as the case is in Hunger Ward in Yemen, I look for hope and I look for inspiration and I do that through people who are doing incredible things under the most difficult circumstances.

So when I set out to do a film about starvation in Yemen, right, I mean just listen to that statement, where's the hope there, right?

And yet what I found, what I discovered, were human beings that we could tell the story through who are incredible, inspirational human beings doing amazing things every day.

1 of those is Makiya Maji, a nurse practitioner in the north of the country at a small rural clinic and another is Dr.

Aida El-Sadiq, who is a pediatrician in the south of the country.

And so we chose to tell the story sort of through their experiences as caregivers, devoting their lives to try to save this entire cohort, this entire generation of children that has been born into starvation.

And that's an incredible difficult task, but equally inspirational to watch these human beings devote every minute of every day to save a child.

I mean, in my view, nothing is more important than that action.

Maybe on that point real quick, so there's suffering at scale, starvation at scale, there's, I mean, the numbers, Maybe you can mention in Yemen, what are the numbers in terms of people in starvation, but from a perspective of a nurse practitioner or a doctor, you're always treating 1 person in front of you.

So how do you make sense of that calculus?

Of like there's a huge number of people suffering and then there's just the person in front of you.

Is that all we can do as humans is just to help 1 person at a time?

Is that the right way to think and to approach these problems or can you actually make sense of the numbers?

Speaking just as a human being I think the scale of suffering is so great in Yemen that I Think I'd be overwhelmed right if I focused on that scale, you know You've probably heard that you know a child dies every 75 seconds in Yemen from hunger.

That's a good handful of children that have already passed away.

So to overcome sort of I think that danger of psychic numbing which can happen when you think about suffering on such a large scale as a filmmaker, as a human being, I have to focus in on the individuals, on those human beings in front of me.

El-Sadiq and Makiya do, to keep going each day.

And 1 of the amazing things about these 2 healthcare providers that we showcase in the film is that they treat anyone who shows up, right?

They don't have to have money, they don't have to have any resources, they just have to get to the clinic or the hospital.

And it's incredibly moving to see sort of the flexibility of their thinking in terms of how they make that work.

Makia, for example, I saw her in the north of the country.

It's an incredibly rural clinic that she works at, So it's like a magnet for all the cases in the north of the country.

People come from hundreds of kilometers away sometimes for specialty treatment of a pediatric malnutrition.

And I, 1 time I saw a child come in and it was a male relative that brought this young girl in.

And you know, just because of sort of the gender dynamics in Yemen, you know, there had to be a parent or a relative there to stay with the child while they're at the clinic.

And so, you know, what many doctors in that instance would do would just turn them away.

And instead what Makia did is she walked into 1 of the rooms, talked to 1 of the other mothers and convinced them to become the temporary guardian, essentially, of this child until a female relative could arrive.

She finds solutions rather than allowing the problems to deter solutions.

You mentioned that you saw a child die in front of you.

So when you're filming this as a filmmaker, what's that like psychologically, philosophically, creatively as a filmmaker, as a storyteller.

What do you do there, as a human and as a filmmaker?

Because you get to, like you said, you take it through the whole journey of a starving mother giving birth to a starving child.

It's not something that I certainly wanted to happen or seek out, but it happened.

And the sad truth is that it happens every week at that hospital.

And so when it happened in this instance, I felt an incredible responsibility to do justice to that reality, to acknowledge that a child had just died of starvation-related causes and to find some way, if the parents wanted us to, to integrate that into this story we'd bring back to a Western audience.

And you know, I've filmed many difficult things over the years, and usually I really love filming.

It was not a process that I enjoyed on any way, shape, or form, sadly, because of the content.

Because who wants to watch a child die in front of them?

And when that happened, I felt an incredible responsibility again to go deep, right?

To go deep with that family, to tell the story of this hospital with every sort of ounce of focus and talent that I could bring to the story because people should know that children are dying of starvation right now as we sit here, and that that doesn't have to happen, and it is happening because of political dynamics that we can intervene on.

Is there times you wanted to walk away, quit the telling of the story, come back to the United States where you can just appreciate the wonderful comfort you can have just sitting there and having food and freedom to do whatever you want, those kinds of things.

Doesn't have to be United States, in a lot of places in

Well, that dynamic of sort of like survivor's guilt you know, on some level, definitely exists.

1 of the hardest things, well, from the Hunger Report actually was eating, right?

Because we were in these malnutrition clinics, they're called TFCs, therapeutic feeding centers, where, you know, over a long period of time, children lost the ability to eat normal food, right?

And couldn't digest it and just, you know, were literally starving and the practitioners were trying to bring them back to a state of thriving, but to leave those clinics, right, and to go to our camp or to go to our hotel and then to have access to food, right?

Because we could buy food on the streets and in the hotels.

I mean, it was a very intentional act throughout the course of the shoot to look at a piece of bread, right?

Or to look at a bowl of rice and think about that child in the TFC and think about how the privilege of having that bowl of rice that I could eat and digest.

So it certainly every day helped me appreciate the privilege I had.

And so I wouldn't call it guilt, it wasn't exactly guilt, but it was definitely mindfulness.

Right, just like meditate on the suffering of people who can't.

So that knowledge, it was catalytic in some ways.

It sort of moved us forward, really wanting to shape the most powerful story we could because We were surrounded by so much suffering every day.

How did filming that movie change you as a man?

You filmed a few difficult documentaries.

When you think of the person you were before you filmed it, and now when you wake up every morning and look yourself in the mirror, how's that person different?

Every documentary I do changes me in a different way.

Like I am not static in that sense, right?

It's like I change with every project because so many of them are difficult and challenging, right?

And so in order to do them I have to allow myself to change and be changed by them.

In the case of Hunger Ward, you may remember the girl Omema, who's the the ten-year-old girl who we showcase in in Auden in the south of the country.

And you know We were there when she was admitted to the hospital.

And when she was admitted, you know, this 10-year-old girl weighed 24 pounds and she could barely stand up.

And we started, you know, with the permission of the family to start to document her treatment and to see what would happen with this young girl who is so severely malnourished.

And we watched her be treated by the nurses and the doctors in Sadaka Hospital.

And slowly, over the course of a couple weeks, we saw her change.

We saw her start to sort of gain strength and start to recover.

And she also watched the caregivers very carefully.

And I'll never forget, there was a moment where About 2 and a half weeks, I think, into her treatment, we walked into a room and I saw her offering a capful of water to another younger child who was also starving.

And so to see Omema, this child who's starving, giving sustenance to a younger, more vulnerable child who is also starving, moved me deeply.

So I saw her learn from the caregivers around her.

And as a human being, as a filmmaker, I was incredibly inspired by Omema.

Even within a 10-year-old girl who's starving, right?

And so you asked what changed me, that's 1 moment, right?

Rather than being crushed by such heavy content, it was actually the opposite, where I came away inspired by a 10-year-old girl.

And I didn't anticipate that, I didn't think that's what this content would do, but it's what it did.

It reinforced for me this incredible capacity we all have as human beings, right?

To even within the most difficult circumstances, to choose who we become and what we do.

And a 10 year old girl taught me that or reinforced that for me.

Were you able to feel the culture of the people, so the language barrier, could we be able to break through the language barrier, the culture barrier, you know, to understand the people?

You know, even suffering has a language of sorts, depending on where you are.

The way people joke about things, the way they cry, the way, this is an interesting thing I actually want to ask you.

I find that the people, you know, I've been talking to people in Ukraine and Russia, but in general, I've gotten a chance to talk to people who've been through trauma in their life.

And there's a humor they have about trauma and hard times.

Certainly Russian speaking folk, I mean, the more suffering you've experienced for some reason, the more they joke about it.

It's almost like they're able to see something deep about humanity now that they have suffered and they're able to laugh at the absurdity, the injustice of it all.

And you could also say it's a way for them to deal with it.

But that humor has a kind of profound like understanding within it about what it means to be human.

And to really understand it, you have to know the language.

I guess I'm asking, were you able to really feel the humans and the other side of the language?

I mean, as you noted, there are universals in life that transcend language, right?

Compassion doesn't take place only through language, right?

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Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering | Lex Fridman Podcast #278