This blog, is written to express my great admiration for the bravest woman I have ever known -- and commemorates the life of a very dear friend Vanya Kewley. Vanya, a uniquely brave and gifted television documentary film-maker distinguished herself by exposing human rights and women's rights violations on film worldwide. This almost always meant she had to risk life and limb herself in travelling to the far corners of the world to film her stories. Although she was little more than five feet tall and weighed not much more than seven stones, her courage was always at least a match for the male foreign correspondents she often worked alongside. She was also beautiful, elegant and charming. The Guardian newspaper published her obituary earlier this week and it follows the photograph below, taken outside her home in Cheyne Row, Chelsea..
To see the original obituary and another photograph of Vanya with His Holiness the Dalai Lamai, who was a close friend, see the link http://t.co/237dwyTN
VANYA KEWLEY
Outstanding BritIsh TelevIsion Foreign Correspondent Who
Exposed Human Rights Violations Worldwide
Vanya Kewley, who has died aged 74, was the courageous and passionate producer-director of many outstanding television documentaries exposing human-rights violations across the world. Most famously, after three years of secret contacts with Tibetan exiles, in 1988 she smuggled an amateur video camera and sound equipment into Tibet. Working alone, she made the first documentary in 40 years about that remote region, which had been effectively cut off from the outside world since Mao Tse-tung’s victorious Red Army swept in after the end of China’s civil war in 1949.
Slipping away by secret arrangement from a tourist group, she travelled in disguise in peasant garb, helped by local guides for a period of six weeks and covered over 4,000 miles across Tibet’s high mountains and valleys. She interviewed some 160 individuals, including monks, nuns and ex-political prisoners, who described on camera their experiences of torture, famine and arbitrary imprisonment; some of the women spoke of enforced abortions they had suffered. The resulting film Tibet: A Case to Answer, transmitted by Channel 4 in 1988, caused a stir worldwide and was unusually broadcast twice more in the UK within a few months.
It was also shown specially to members of both houses of parliament in London and for some members of the US Congress and the European parliament. Highly controversial, in particular it presented detailed Tibetan statistics claiming that more than a million people out of a population of six million had died at the hands of the Chinese. The film drew repeated protests from Beijing when it was shown in more than a dozen other countries. China’s ambassadors in those posts however declined offers to debate the film publicly live on air with its producer-director.
Working first for Granada Television’s World in Action and later for the BBC’s Anno Domini, Everyman and Omnibus series, ITV’s This Week and TV Eye, and Channel Four’s Dispatches, Vanya also made an early reputation for herself, gaining exclusive filmed interviews with controversial then little known world leaders including Colonel Muammar Gaddafi (Soldier for Islam, 1978) and General Odumegwu Ojukwu (The Man Who Made Biafra, 1970). She also made the first comprehensive documentary about the Dalai Lama (The Lama King, 1975). Later, Vanya became a personal friend of the Dalai Lama, and visited him regularly in Dharamsala. In 1977 she won first prize at the prestigious annual Montreux film and television festival for her documentary South Korea (1975).
Her only book, entitled Tibet: Behind the Ice Curtain, was published in 1990, effectively telling two stories in one – what she described as “the journey of my life” through Tibet in 1988 and the sufferings of its people over four decades. In the mid-1970s she uncovered on film the widespread use of torture in Paraguay (Paradise Lost, 1976) and at different times reported human rights and women’s rights controversies from Bangladesh, Belfast, Oman, Chad, the Lebanon, Chile, Nicaragua and Ngorno Karabakh. In 1991 she returned to Tibet, this time smuggling herself into the country across the Himalayas, hidden beneath the floorboards of a van, to make a follow-up to the earlier film, again for Channel 4, entitled Voices from Tibet.
Danger was never far away in the locations in which she chose to film. Vanya and her crew were severely beaten up by Ugandan border guards in Africa when mistaken for mercenaries, and she was also imprisoned there for a time; she was clubbed unconscious and came very close to being raped in South Sudan while filming and living without permission among that country’s Ananya “freedom fighters”; in Vietnam she contracted infective hepatitis and liver abscesses while filming in the jungle war zones.
Vanya was the daughter of a French mother and a British father who was a diplomat. Born in Calcutta and educated in India, France and Swizerland, mainly in Roman Catholic convent schools, she went on to study philsophy and history for part of a year at the Sorbonne in Paris before deciding to move to London to train and work as a state registered nurse at Charing Cross hospital.
But not entirely satisfied with nursing, she began writing in her spare time for local London newspapers before developing an ambition for television journalism .“I began knocking on every studio door I could find until someone asked me inside,” she later told one magazine interviewer. In 1965 she joined Granada TV in Manchester, where she first read the news, before training as a producer-director with World in Action.
Vanya never forgot her practical nursing skills or the desire to apply them. At different periods, she put her camera aside to work as a nurse and spokesperson for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in troublespots such as Rwanda, and similarly for the Red Cross in Bosnia. She was present in Rwanda, on nursing duties, during the horrific 1994 genocide when 800,000 people were slaughtered.
At different times she formally adopted and sponsored the education of two girls from Tibet, Pema Choezam and Choezam Tsering, and a boy in Rwanda, Jean-Paul Habineza. They survive her. In 2000 Vanya married Michael Lambert, a soil scientist. Michael died of bone cancer in 2004. For some 30 years Vanya lived mainly in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, and she named her independent film company Cheyne Productions Ltd.
Over the last 19 years of her life, she suffered from Parkinson’s disease. But as recently as December last year, despite increasing incapacity, she managed to travel alone to India and visit Dharamsala where on Boxing Day she had what turned out to be her last meeting with the Dalai Lama.
Anthony Grey
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