Focus on the Forgotten
Filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy frequents the world’s trouble spots to give the voiceless a global hearing.
BY DIANE ROGERS
PROGRESS REPORT: Obaid-Chinoy revisited Afghanistan in 2007 to see liberation’s effect on women. Her findings: too many are still abused and downtrodden.
Photo: Ethan Hill

For anyone who has seen Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s latest documentary, the nightly news may never be the same again. The young filmmaker delves beyond headlines into everyday lives. Iraq: The Lost Generation is her troubling examination of the plight of some of the 4 million refugees who have fled Iraq since the U.S. invasion in 2003.

Step inside the burn unit of a hospital in Amman, Jordan, and kneel with Obaid-Chinoy at the side of a youngster in a wheelchair. What does Hannan, who already has endured 12 operations, want most? “I wish for more surgeries,” she says, to enable her to walk again.

Or listen to the story of a young boy who was horribly disfigured when “a man exploded himself” on a busy Baghdad street. The boy’s mother, father, three sisters and three brothers died in the blast. “I miss all of them,” he says quietly, through a translator. “Especially my mum.”

Obaid-Chinoy, who earned a master’s degree in international policy studies from Stanford in 2003 and a second master’s in communication the following year, turns 30 in November and has already made 13 documentaries (sharmeenobaidfilms.com) aired on PBS, CNN, the Discovery Times Channel, Channel 4 (U.K.), ABC Australia and al-Jazeera International. Her award-winning work has taken her to places ranging from immigrant ghettos in Sweden to dump sites in her native Karachi, Pakistan, where Afghan child refugees forage for survival, to crime-ridden quarters of Johannesburg, where Zimbabwean immigrants have fled from the Robert Mugabe regime. She has documented the emerging women’s movement in Saudi Arabia and the resurgence of rebel groups in East Timor.

“My passion is to bring the voices of minorities, women and refugees from one part of the world to another,” she says, over coffee at a San Francisco Starbucks. “My films are all my journeys, traveling through these places, meeting people—that’s the basic theme.”

Obaid-Chinoy says her latest film was one of the hardest to make. She spent two months early this year interviewing Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan and found it was “not easy to distance yourself from these people. They are educated people who had good lives in Iraq—they were doctors, lawyers, schoolteachers—and you can imagine yourself in their position asking yourself, ‘What would my options be?’”

The options Obaid-Chinoy filmed are heartbreaking. She interviews a 16-year-old girl who was orphaned by the war and then sold to wealthy Arab men in Damascus. The filmmaker follows a 35-year-old Iraqi woman as she works the dark streets of that city—a holder of a business degree who now supports her family by prostitution. Obaid-Chinoy interviews a former contractor for the U.S. Army who fled his homeland when local militia branded him a traitor. “We had jobs in Iraq,” says another woman in the crowded basement of a Christian church in Damascus. “Now we’re eating in a soup kitchen.”
PROGRESS REPORT: Obaid-Chinoy revisited Afghanistan in 2007 to see liberation’s effect on women. Her findings: too many are still abused and downtrodden.

PROGRESS REPORT: Obaid-Chinoy revisited Afghanistan in 2007 to see liberation’s effect on women. Her findings: too many are still abused and downtrodden.

Courtesy Sharmeen Obaid Films

In telling the stories of the forgotten and the traumatized, Obaid-Chinoy has a distinct perspective as one of the first Muslim women to work with major Western TV networks. Asked about her 2007 film, Lifting the Veil/Afghanistan Unveiled, she rails against the Taliban-enforced oppression of women. “None of this is allowed in Islam,” Obaid-Chinoy says, with a slow-burning fire. “I get angry a lot, and many times you see that on camera because I know the audience is also feeling angry and is asking, ‘Why is this happening?’ In many cases, they may think it’s happening because it’s ordained in my religion. So I really have to educate people by saying, ‘Absolutely not. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.’”

She doesn’t flush the color of the red chunk of topaz she wears around her neck, but Obaid-Chinoy clearly has a viewpoint and a voice. As assistant professor Fred Turner, her adviser in the communication department, puts it, “She’s a force of nature.

“She was good at doing school and doing [journalism] on the side, and doing it very aggressively,” he says. “If you had a student who was making films that were airing on the Discovery Channel, and she was taking your ‘how to be a reporter’ class, I think you’d give her a few days off, too.”

Turner says Obaid-Chinoy came to her studies with a “very clear sense of the kinds of questions and issues she was interested in studying.” She not only knew her way around Pakistani politics, he adds, but also “around the Middle East more broadly.” And she makes no excuses. “She’s been a woman working in some very tough environments, and has never once raised that issue,” Turner says. “She thinks of herself as a reporter, and she just gets out there and does it. It’s her real hunger and curiosity to understand and make visible the lives of people who are otherwise hard to see.”

This is not the work of a detached storyteller. While filming Highway of Tears (2006), about Aboriginal women going missing in British Columbia, Obaid-Chinoy supported vigils in local neighborhoods. For City of Guilt (2006), she advocated on behalf of women denied contraception in the Philippines.
PROGRESS REPORT: Obaid-Chinoy revisited Afghanistan in 2007 to see liberation’s effect on women. Her findings: too many are still abused and downtrodden.

PROGRESS REPORT: Obaid-Chinoy revisited Afghanistan in 2007 to see liberation’s effect on women. Her findings: too many are still abused and downtrodden.

Courtesy Sharmeen Obaid Films

Raised in an affluent family in Karachi, Obaid-Chinoy was educated in the West, majoring in economics and government at Smith College. “My parents encouraged all of their [five] daughters to get an education,” she says. “All my sisters were educated in the U.S., and they’re all working and doing new things, all in some ways breaking boundaries.”

Obaid-Chinoy had written for a Karachi newspaper as a teenager and freelanced articles about Pakistani politics in her undergraduate years. By the time she enrolled at Stanford, she was working for the now-defunct television production division of the New York Times as a reporter and producer. “I’d been a print journalist for a while, and I felt that to make people understand what was happening in the Muslim world, you really had to make it visual. You can pick up a newspaper and read an article, and to some extent you can imagine the place and the suffering. But when you hear it firsthand, I think it leaves a different kind of mark.”

Communication professor Ted Glasser notes that Obaid-Chinoy’s earliest documentaries demonstrate that “she’s focused, she’s energetic and she’s talented—an unbeatable combination.” His former student, he adds, “is a very good storyteller, and is very assertive when it comes to getting at what she wants to get at. By that, I mean she goes after facts, wherever they take her.”

Obaid-Chinoy, in turn, says she got a “fantastic” education in Turner’s courses on media and new technology. “When I was at Stanford, in 2003 and ‘04, people were just starting to think that print journalism and newspapers might become something of the past,” she recalls. “So we were really ahead of the curve, and I learned a lot of theory and a lot about technology.”

Her first fieldwork, to film Terror’s Children, also had afforded a lesson. The New York Times television division had given Obaid-Chinoy a two-week crash course in “how to direct, what to do with a camera, how to work sound” and sent her off to Karachi in the summer of 2002. Three weeks into filming, she shipped her first batch of tapes back to New York. “And I got a frantic call from them, saying, ‘There’s no audio.’ So we had to go back and re-film.” Obaid-Chinoy spent 10 weeks following eight children forced out of their homes in war-torn Afghanistan as they resurfaced in Karachi refugee camps, religious schools and scavenger enclaves near garbage dumps.

She made two award-winning films while at Stanford, traveling and editing during spring and summer breaks. Reinventing the Taliban? (2003) looks at the growth of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan; Obaid-Chinoy ventured into the movement’s stronghold in the country’s northwest to interview its leaders, as well as ordinary citizens who support the creation of a society modeled on the Taliban’s oppression of women, limited civil liberties and anti-American policies. The film won her the 2004 Livingston Award for journalists under 35; she was the first non-American to be chosen.
EXILES: Obaid-Chinoy spent two months interviewing Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan.

EXILES: Obaid-Chinoy spent two months interviewing Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan.

Courtesy Sharmeen Obaid Films

On a Razor’s Edge (2004) continued Obaid-Chinoy’s portrayal of Pakistan, this time weighing the prospects for peace with India over the disputed territory of Kashmir, predominantly Muslim. The filmmaker conducts prickly interviews with Pakistan’s former army chief of staff and the country’s former intelligence chief, and she secures a clandestine, candlelit meeting with outlawed Kashmiri jihadis. The film was part of PBS’s Frontline series “Stories from a Small Planet,” which won an Overseas Press Club award in 2004.

Obaid-Chinoy’s work also has been recognized by American Women in Radio and Television and by the South Asian Journalist Association. In 2007, she became the youngest recipient of the One World Media Award for broadcast journalist of the year in the United Kingdom. At the Livingston awards ceremony in New York in 2005, Obaid-Chinoy met award juror and CNN chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour, a previous recipient, whose reports on the first Gulf War she had followed closely.

“She was always my model, growing up,” Obaid-Chinoy recalls. “I watched her on television when I was 11, and I said, ‘I want to do what she does.’ She, in some ways, is a minority, too, having come from an Iranian background. And knowing the kinds of barriers she’d been able to break— that was a trajectory I was interested in following.”

On a recent trip to Kabul, to shoot Lifting the Veil/Afghanistan Unveiled, Obaid-Chinoy slipped into a burka to “walk in the shoes” of a 40-year-old Afghan widow who was supporting her children by begging on the street. As young boys mocked her and as older men shouted abuse, she felt the humiliation the older woman endured every day. “I never put [the burka] on unless it’s absolutely necessary,” Obaid-Chinoy says. “It’s a garment that restricts mobility, and, quite frankly, God made women in a certain way, and that’s the beauty of a woman—to be who she is.”

In reports from the field, Obaid-Chinoy dresses casually, often in jeans. Hand-held cameras follow her down busy Damascus sidewalks, and she will turn from a conversation on a corner to look directly into the lens and relay what she’s just learned. She has no objections to wearing a head-scarf, “because that’s according to my religion,” but she may choose a defiant color. “Red really does stand out,” she says. Sly smile.

Although Obaid-Chinoy lived for some years in Toronto with her businessman husband, Fahd Chinoy, they moved back to Pakistan this year and she travels on a Pakistani passport. As a result, she often gets what she calls “interesting” questions from customs officials. “When you have a passport with stamps from Iraq, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia, you get a lot of, ‘Really, are you a journalist?’ Because how many women do you come across from my part of the world who do what I do?” Obaid-Chinoy’s not-so-standard response? “I say, ‘Just Google my name.’”

The search-engine results only stand to increase with her growing portfolio. Obaid-Chinoy is completing a book about the political history of her native Pakistan, told through the experience of two generations of Pakistani women. Also in the works: a film on Mugabe, and another about Israel and Palestine.
DIANE ROGERS, MLA ‘99, is clinical affairs writer at the School of Medicine and Stanford Hospital & Clinics.

The struggles of Iraqi refugees displaced by war and sectarian violence will hit close to home Monday during a screening of a new documentary.

Award-winning director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy will present her film, “Iraq: The Lost Generation,” at the Landmark Embassy Cinema on Pine Street.

Obaid-Chinoy, a graduate of Smith College and native of Pakistan, has received several international honors, including an Overseas Press Club Award and American Women in Radio and Film Award.

Her documentaries cover a wide range of issues and places, including Pakistan, Afghanistan and Indonesia. She hopes that this film will allow Americans to see stories she says are not covered by the mainstream press.

“‘The Lost Generation’ came about because, for a long time, I had been hearing about what had been happening in Iraq, but rarely did I get a picture of who the Iraqis were,” she said. “I always thought Iraqis were just numbers I read about in headlines. But who were the people behind those numbers? What were their lives like? What were their families like?”

In addition to trying to answer these questions, Obaid-Chinoy said her film will allow viewers to see a part of the world many Americans have never seen before.

The event is sponsored by Primary Source, a Watertown nonprofit with the goal of improving students’ understanding of the world by educating their teachers.

Julie Newport, the Primary Source director of communications, says the event was planned to “connect the general public with stories about world history and culture that are not told very often.” She hopes that this will give the community the opportunity to talk to someone who has been to that part of the world and met Iraqi refugees.

Following the film, Primary Source will be hosting a reception at Solea on Moody Street, to allow for casual discussion over tapas and sangria and provide an opportunity to meet the director.

Obaid-Chinoy hopes viewers will see that Iraqis are not different than Americans.

“I would like people to see Iraqis as people with families and lives that are similar to ours,” she said. “I’d like to humanize their problems.

“Iraqis are just like you and I, but the war has torn the social fabric of that society. It will impact a young generation that may never recover.”

The event will be held Monday, Nov. 3, 6:30 p.m., at Landmark Embassy Cinema of Waltham. The movie is 50 minutes. Tickets cost $15 for the film and $40 for the film and reception and must be purchased in advance online at http://primarysource.kintera.org/iraqfilm.

Smith grad’s documentary on Iraq focuses on the ordinary people affected by war

INTERVIEW. A native of Pakistan and a graduate of Smith College, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is an award-winning journalist who has made 13 documentary films. Her latest film, “Iraq: The Lost Generation,” examines the plight of Iraqi refugees displaced due to war. She will screen the film Monday at 6:30 p.m. at Waltham’s Embassy Cinemas.

What message do you want to deliver with this film?
I want people to see Iraqis as people, not just numbers behind headlines. Usually when people in this part of the world think of Iraq they think about the headlines but they never get to know who the people are.

How much of a crisis is the situation surrounding Iraqi refugees?
We’re talking about 4 million people who have been driven from their homes. This is a country that had a functioning society. It had a middle class, schools, colleges, universities, doctors and lawyers despite the politics of Saddam Hussein. And the social fabric of the country has absolutely been torn. These are educated people who don’t know how to survive in war because they’ve never had to face that reality before.

Is there a common thread in the people you have profiled worldwide that transcends the distance between them?
My films are not about the government or prime ministers or presidents. They’re about what happens to the people of a country when a government makes a certain policy or when war is forced upon them. That’s what binds them, whether I am in Canada filming the Aboriginal community or in Syria filming Iraqi refugees. Ordinary people very often don’t get the chance to tell their stories. I myself have learned so much from their resiliency and their courage. I think the world should get the same chance.

Tony Lee

BY Joe Rubin

Joe Rubin is curator and presenter of FRONTLINE/World’s iWitness, an ongoing series of interviews with reporters and newsmakers in flashpoint regions across the world.

>>see the video interview here

Our reporter in Pakistan says the next U.S. president faces major policy challenges there as the hearts and minds of future generations are being won in Taliban-influenced religious schools, and a weak and warring civilian government shows little appetite to take on the growing insurgency. Watch her interview and video clips from Karachi and read her dispatch below.

A Country in Peril

by Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy

Pakistani politics are not for the weak hearted. In a typical week here, the president of the country resigned, the two main political parties had a falling out, two powerful bomb blasts ripped through the country and at least 100 people were killed in skirmishes in the Tribal belt.

I was born and raised in Pakistan, but I have spent the better part of the past 10 years living in the West, mainly the United States and Canada. My husband and I made the decision to move back to Pakistan early last year. After all, the economy was doing well, security had improved tremendously, and a number of young Pakistanis were opening up new businesses. It was safe to say, society was thriving.

The bubble burst soon after we landed this year.

In the past few months, newspaper headlines here have screamed out news of scores of girls’ schools being burnt, video stores being ransacked, women being beheaded, hundreds of suicide bombers ready to attack, offices shut down for immoral behavior, stunning the country into silence.

The Taliban has arrived

Two weeks ago, my neighbors and I woke up to the news that an elderly couple, who live several streets away, had received a letter signed and dated by the Taliban, asking them dismiss their hired help because they were involved in “immoral activity” deemed un-Islamic by the Taliban. The shocked couple did not know who to turn to.

In the capital Islamabad, while Benazir Bhuto’s husband Asif Ali Zardari and the main opposition leader Nawaz Sharif wrangle for power, no clear policy for dealing with militants has been outlined. This is despite the fact that more 60 bomb blasts have rocked the country in the past 12 months, and that in the past month alone, the fighting in the tribal belt and in the Swat Valley has intensified to warrant heavy reinforcements by the Pakistan Army.

Posters warning against infiltration of the Taliban appear in neighborhoods across Karachi.

“The man the United States relied on to fight the war on terror is now gone,” said Zubair Kadir, a lawyer who celebrated the resignation of President Pervez Musharraf by handing out sweets to his neighbors. “America put all its eggs in the same basket and now they don’t know who they should deal with.”

This is a sentiment that resonates deep within Pakistani society. The question on everybody’s mind is what will America’s next step be and how will the two presidential candidates deal with the country?

The fear amongst many Pakistanis is that a Democratic Party win will isolate Pakistan. They point to Bill Clinton’s policies and the fact that he spent only four hours in Islamabad in his eight-year tenure in the White House. “We cannot afford isolation,” says Sabiha Hamid, a businesswoman who runs a software company. “Pakistan is embroiled in a civil war, whether our government likes to admit it or not, and we will never win this war on our own.

We need America’s financial and moral support, said Hamid, whose business has been affected by the political instability in the country. “I think John McCain’s rhetoric and policies reflect those of the Bush administration and Pakistan needs that now more than ever.”

On August 25th, the Pakistan government — after years of side stepping — finally banned the Pakistani Taliban and identified it as a “terrorist” organization freezing its assets and bank accounts. The Taliban retaliated by issuing a warning in all the major cities: a spate of suicide bombings is now on the cards. For the 160 million Pakistanis, a new front on the war on terror has developed, right in their backyards. This is no longer America’s war, this is now very much Pakistan’s war.

Kolkata: Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, a documentary filmmaker from Pakistan, likes to travel the road not taken. And it has literally taken her to oil rich Saudi Arabia, war ravaged Afghanistan and the highways of Canada.

In her latest film Birth of a Nation, she explores the plight of the people of East Timor, five years after independence. It explores everything from activities of street gangs to how the United Nations is helping the country hold its Presidential elections.

“Anything can generate an idea for a film,” she says. ” A conversation with a friend or a newspaper report. I am keen on subjects that other people shy away from, the ones that can generate a debate.”

Her latest film on East Timor was shown on Channel 4 this week to rave reviews. But she is not resting on her laurels and has already started working on her next theme—Pakistan at cross roads.

“My country is at a critical juncture right now, and I am interested in exploring the role of religion and how it is shaping our identity in Pakistan,” she said.

Sharmeen has always been adventurous, so to say. She was the first girl in her affluent and conservative household to complete her graduation. Then she flew to the United States to study at Stanford University for her masters in International Policy Studies and Communication.

When she was 16, she was a reporter doing undercover stories on the sale of passports to illegal immigrants. “That landed me in a lot of trouble,” she recalls. Graffiti abusing her appeared on the walls of Karachi.

“I think it is our duty to challenge the status quo,” says Sharmeen. “I have a voice and I want to use it to bridge the gap between the east and the west. More importantly, I want to help my own country, which is going through troubled times.”

She started her career by working as a journalist for New York Times Television. It was while covering the plight of Afghani refugee children in Pakistan that she first thought of making a documentary film.

“Their situation was so dire, and their stories so compelling, that I decided to return to Pakistan and create a film about them,” she says. “Smith College and New York Times Television gave me funds.”

That was how Terror’s Children was born in 2003. Since then, Sharmeen has made 12 highly acclaimed documentaries. Her films were hard hitting and she was called Christine Amanpour of the east.

She trains her camera on stark and controversial realities. In Terror’s Children a boy in a pro-Taliban religious school looks gravely at her and tells her that those who believe in God must not watch TV. Women do not need an education and, he says pointedly, the filmmaker’s face should be covered with a veil.

“I particularly remember tracing the paths of illegal immigrants in the treacherous borders of South-Africa and Zimbabwe for The New Apartheid, a nerve-wracking experience,” says Sharmeen.

And the toughest assignment was the documentary on women in the highly segregated society of Saudi Arabia. But the 29-year-old filmmaker was able to capture the nascent women’s movement in Women in the Holy Kingdom.

The journey has been rewarding. Sharmeen is the first non-American journalist to be awarded the prestigious Livingston Award. Her film, Reinventing the Taliban, which explored the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan, got her the Special Jury Award at the BANFF TV festival in Canada and the American Women in Radio and Television award. The accolades continue to pour in.

“The two most difficult films for me were Afghanistan Unveiled and Cold Comfort,” she recalls. “I travelled across Afghanistan to see how the lives of women had changed in the last five years,” she says. “Their condition was pathetic. Hundreds of women were committing suicide by setting themselves ablaze to escape the horrors of forced marriage. The badly disfigured survivors talked to me.”

When Britain and America went into Afghanistan in 2001, they claimed that the liberation of women would be one of their main priorities. Did they deliver? Award-winning Pakistani journalist and documentary filmmaker, SHARMEEN OBAID-CHINOY, finds out what life is like for the women behind the burqa. She argues that the liberation of Afghan women is mostly theoretical, despite the advances in Kabul where there are female journalists and politicians. Tribal customary codes still rule supreme and the position of women is dire and unchanged. Her documentary for Dispatches, Afghanistan Unveiled, is broadcast on Thursday 17 May at 9.00pm on Channel 4.

Documentarian Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy.

Award-winning journalist Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is touring the United States with her latest film, “The Lost Generation,” a documentary on Iraq’s refugee children produced for Great Britain’s prestigious TV station Channel 4. So far, Obaid-Chinoy has been unable to find a U.S. station to televise the documentary. “A few of them have expressed reservations about showing this,” she says.

Focusing on children who have taken refuge in Jordan and Syria, the film addresses their future prospects back home, a country that has undergone constant turmoil since 2003. In the past five years, more than four million people, 20 percent of the entire Iraqi population, have been driven from their homes as a result of the war and sectarian bloodshed. Two million have become exiles, living lives across the border in Syria and Jordan.

The first non-American journalist to win a Livingston Award, the Pakistani filmmaker has a relentless eye for reality—perhaps too relentless for a media looking for stories molded to a commercial frame. She traveled throughout Jordan and Syria to find the war’s youngest victims. Her subjects, often mutilated in body and soul, exhibit a calm lethargy one usually sees in those well advanced in years.

There are young Iraqi women with business degrees working in the brothels of Damascus. They and others have studied for careers they may never have a chance of attaining. For those whose families have been killed in Iraq, future prospects are dim.

There is Hanan, 12, living in Amman. She lost her six siblings and parents in a suicide-bomb attack outside her mosque. The blast left her with severe burns, from head to toe. Obaid-Chinoy asks her what she would wish for most in the world. “Better surgery,” she answers, because Hanan has to cover her head and her crippled feet can’t fit in proper shoes. She goes to a Jordanian hospital for an operation. “Today they are making me more beautiful,” she says, full of joy. But the camera soon catches her tears, when the surgeon explains that she has to wait another year. The waiting list is endless, and new names are added every day.

Obaid-Chinoy meets former translators who worked for British and American troops and have had to flee for their lives. In Syria, their army recommendations have now become worthless, and the countries they risked their lives to support have meanwhile turned their backs on them. Great Britain, for example, accepted only four Iraqi Asylum seekers from Syria in 2007, according to a United Nations Development Program official who spoke with Obaid-Chinoy.

In 2007, when the filmmaker began to study the Iraq war, she decided that meeting refugees outside their country would help her understand the situation in Iraq. In April of that year, the United Nations Commissioners for Refugees (UNHCR) called a conference in Geneva, declaring that Iraq’s humanitarian crisis could no longer be ignored. UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres asked for a “sustained, comprehensive and coordinated international response to ease the plight of millions of people uprooted by the conflict.”

A study by the U.S. based  Refugees International (RI) on the current situation for Iraqi refugees paints a sad picture. Two of the group’s advocates, Kristèle Younès and Jake Kurtzer, who returned from Iraq last November said: “The situation for Iraqi refugees in the Middle East continues to deteriorate, while the scale of the crisis continues to dwarf the international response.” According to their study, the number of displaced Iraqis has reached an unprecedented level—more than 4.5 million—while Iraq’s neighbors have increased restrictions on the refugees.

These restrictions are in part a response to the lack of support from the United States and other donor governments, as well as the government of Iraq itself, to lessen the tremendous burden that the host countries are assuming, according to RI. In January 2008, the organization asked the UN Security Council to improve the response to the Iraqi Refugee Crisis: “Despite its scale, the international response, including that of the United Nations, has been woefully inadequate.”

To date, however, the UN has not substantially increased its presence or humanitarian programs in Iraq, and the government of Iraq is not providing adequate assistance and services to the internally displaced. On the contrary, the Public Distribution of Food system has been reduced by half and is likely to continue shrinking, depriving vulnerable Iraqis of their only lifeline, says RI. According to a UNHCR report in March 2008, current initiatives by the Iraqi government, the UN and the NGO community “are unable to cover the scope of the needs in Iraq” of those internally displaced.

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy describes the situation in Iraq as “one of the greatest humanitarian tragedies in the Middle East since 1948.” Her film would help mobilize the support so desperately needed—if only the world could watch it on TV.

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