Action!

This is my first blog post in a ridiculously long time, so I feel quite sheepish in writing it. Though I don’t expect the internet has been mourning the absence of my fairly mediocre blog posts to any great degree. 

I’ve wanted to blog for ages about things that have been happening in the world. But I fell into that age-old trap of thinking “I’ll get round to that when I have more time to do it justice” – I don’t like the thought of just churning out any old hogwash in a spare 10 minutes.  But fear not, internet – I have returned. People of the world, REJOICE!

All silliness aside, I’ve been thinking long and hard about how exactly to carry out the pledge I made last summer: to do my bit in the fight against sexual abuse against women, both in Egypt and around the world. Noble intentions, yes – but some serious planning and refinement of those ambitions is needed to really make that happen.

I hugely enjoyed helping Unreported World with the production of their 20-minute documentary, ‘Egypt: Sex, Mobs, and Revolution’ broadcast in November on Channel 4. As for my own documentary, I’m in regular contact with the producer who I’ll be working with, and progress is indeed being made. As I outlined some months ago, getting it funded, commissioned, and fitting it all in around the producer’s incredibly busy schedule will take time. But it will happen!

Anyway, having built up industry experience and undergone a long and wonderful road of deep holistic healing and renewal (don’t worry – I’m not going to start trying to sell you homeopathic remedies or the ‘Natasha Smith “Love Yourself” Guide To Life’), I’m now itching to do more for womankind. Particularly after being inspired by coverage of a new documentary, “Brave Miss World” – please DO look it up.

I, along with billions of people worldwide, was deeply shaken and disturbed by the horrific Delhi gang-rape case (and the more recent devastating rape and murder of 3 Indian sisters). My instinct was to blog about it. But then I thought…what can I say? What can I possibly write in a blog post that billions of people around the world aren’t already saying? I started to focus more on what I could do.

I’ve been thinking long and hard about what exactly to do. Sexual violence against women is such a truly global phenomenon that it’s difficult to highlight its occurrence in one part of the world without appearing to neglect all those women suffering in the Congo, in Syria, in Pakistan, in America, in France, in the UK…and in every country on Earth.

So, do I make a documentary on every country in the world? Do I gradually work my way through a list of misogynistic global hotspots? And, standing next to the plethora of existing NGOs and charitable organisations designed to fight the sexual abuse of women, what can I bring to the table?

I’ll stop with the (possibly irritating) rhetorical questions now and cut to the chase. As a British young woman, I’ve decided to hit home with this global problem. I want to develop my own documentary that will resonate with young men and women growing up in the UK. I want a UK audience to see that sexual violence and discrimination against women is as relevant at home as it is abroad – just in different ways.

So, my aim is to highlight to a UK audience that sexual abuse is not confined to far-flung countries like India, Syria, or Egypt; nor is it confined to the Jimmy Savile era, the horrors of which are, disgracefully, only now being brought to light; nor is it confined to abuses carried out by priests in the Catholic Church. Sexual abuse plagues the younger generation of Brits in a far quieter, subtler, yet equally deplorable way.

Needless to say, we all know that rape occurs in the UK – it affects nearly 70,000 women every year. But I really don’t think we’re open enough about it. To a degree, I don’t think young men necessarily realise that rape jokes might not count as “banter”, and I don’t think young women necessarily realise that they have a right not to laugh at them without being branded that most unfashionable of things: a “feminist”. I could go on to talk about the widely-discussed controversy over telling women “don’t get raped” rather than telling men not to rape, and the pervasive “blame the victim” culture, but I feel these points have been very widely discussed already on the internet (and I may end up ranting for hours).

I must, though, express my admiration for the Home Office’s anti-rape ad campaign. But what concerns me are the general attitudes of young men and women – towards rape and who is to be held responsible - that necessitate such an ad campaign. 

Telling women how they should dress and behave to avoid rape – note Tory MP Richard Graham and Joanna Lumley’s blunderous comments - only serve to further inflame this debate.

To round up, I don’t want to give too much away, and it’s very early days for this project. I’m putting out feelers to see how this documentary could work, so please do get in touch with any feedback or further ideas.

Thanks for reading this delayed and horrendously long post!

 

Season’s greetings amid hard work and meetings

It’s all been pretty hectic lately. A couple of days after jumping off the plane from Lithuania, two proverbial buses came to pick me up at once. Bus number one was headed to London, for a luxurious few weeks of paid work as a Researcher at TwoFour Productions. Bus number 2 was Bristol-bound, leading me to an unpaid but hugely useful placement as a Researcher with BBC Inside Out West. Naturally, I got all flustered. “Agh! Which one do I pick? The world could end if I pick the wrong one!”

I ended up getting a little savvy instead, and managed to bag myself both positions: one week with TwoFour in London; two weeks with the BBC in Bristol. Fortune seems to favour those who travel to Lithuania, since the accommodation I secured at the last minute in both London and in Bristol was acquired through friends made in my delightful (ahem) trip to Vilnius.

The week at TwoFour was interesting – my first experience with factual entertainment. It was wonderful to be treated with respect, and to be entrusted with a fair amount of responsibility. It was quite empowering to be tackling legal and compliance issues; I was now contributing something genuinely important to a TV production. Not to mention the joys of having teas, coffees, cokes, juices, and snacks on speed dial from the dedicated team of runners at the editing studios.

My time with BBC Inside Out West has been jam-packed with useful hints and tips about working in factual TV. Having churned out a steady stream of ideas over the past 8 days, I now recognise that Inside Out specifically is a tricky format for which to develop story ideas. I’m a little too used to reaching out to global issues, quietly trying to change the world from my keyboard, so it’s been a challenge to hone in on specific stories and characters that reach out to a local audience. I’ve been building up some essential skills across the board, from research and development, to filming on location (well, helping to film on location – sadly I wasn’t entrusted to run off with the BBC’s incredibly large, back-breaking, camera on my own), to editing, digitising, logging, and even – joyously – transcribing, rushes. Once again, I’ve been treated with a lot of respect, and I really appreciate that. It’s boosting my confidence all the time.

I’ve got the rest of the week with Inside Out West before chugging on home to flop onto a chair and gorge myself on chocolates, turkey, roast potatoes, pigs in blankets, cheese (so much cheese), crisps, and drink port and cider for the next couple of weeks. Oh, and it’s also Christmas, I think.

The new year looks set to bring some exciting new opportunities, if things go to plan. But I’m getting used to surprises and last-minute changes of plan, so who knows! Either way, I’m looking forward to 2013 – I’ve got a feeling it’s going to be a good year.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Vexed in Vilnius

It’s taken me a while to get my head around my recent trip to Vilnius, Lithuania, and the bizarre events that unfolded while I was there. Nothing shocking or horrifying, I assure you, but many lessons learnt in how not to run a business/placement/organisation and how to make the best of a bad situation.

Being thrown in at the deep end with a cluster of strangers with diverse creative/media backgrounds was always going to be a risky endeavour, and one heck of a challenge. Yet, for the first week at least, we got to work on the TV placement we’d been stationed to complete, working through our differences and conjuring up exciting ways to cover the Scanorama Film Festival. We had lovely meals out and made friends. Then came the second week.

The programme leader showed up, and it pretty much all went to pot. The instructions issued were: “as of today, all plans go out of the window!” – hardly an encouraging response to our valiant efforts of the first week. Worse still, responses to our queries about the programme (which was becoming increasingly suspect in our minds) such as “whoops – maybe we weren’t supposed to tell you that!” did little to set our minds at ease. Talk of “emergence theory“, “personal development” and other spiritual incentives for us being there aroused fear and suspicion amid the ranks, provoking frenzied cries of “cult! Cult!”.

Meanwhile, the popping up of an increasing number of mysterious clients who we were unwittingly “working” for as “volunteers” felt like a bizarre game of whack-a-mole. No longer were we plugging away to satisfy the nice folks at Scanorama; suddenly new demands were firing in from all directions – demands that were never fully explained by our trusty programme leader. Why were we working for so many people? Why were we being drip-fed so much information? What was the company leading the programme really getting out of our unpaid efforts, and how much of the EU’s trusty funding were they pocketing for the company’s own growth? Weirdest of all: why did we get the feeling we were human guinea pigs in a surreal social experiment, with our programme leader spearheading some kind of socio-spiritual-networking-business-based revolution for humankind?

Anyway – onto one of many favoured buzz phrases that clog up our education system: “lessons learned”. I learned how not to run a programme. I learned how to deal with the total breakdown of organisation and communication, and become a self-starter, always armed with a plan B. The first week also gave me a confidence boost, as members of the team praised my skills in coordinating the team’s efforts and activities. So I’ve got plenty of lessons to take on with me as I keep chugging forward, even if I do sometimes feel my career progress is full of stops and starts, speeding ahead at walking pace – the average speed of the South West’s trains amid all this flooding.

As for Lithuania itself, it’s really quite fascinating. I think I shall even do a separate blog post about national and regional identity in Eastern Europe, and how it compares to our common perceptions of the region as being somewhat bleak and neglected. Stay tuned – I’ll be posting a far more regular stream of posts on current affairs from around the world from now on.

P.S. Click here to see a sample of what I was involved in. I wrote the post, helped conduct the interviews, and edited the interviews too.

To Lithuania With Love

As Bond-fever sweeps the nation, I’m about to go on a not-so-top-secret mission of my own. In a terrific twist of fate, I’m off to Lithuania this Sunday for a 2-week TV placement/programme run by Ontente, all centred around the upcoming Scanorama film festival in Vilnius. One of the candidates dropped out at the last minute, so I swooped in for the kill, and…result! I‘ll be working with a team of creative, vibrant young minds to create TV coverage for the entire festival, and will also be treated to some valuable talks/training with some great media and business professionals. The best part? It’s all covered by an EC-issued grant targeted at impoverished, ambitious grads like me, so I won’t need to pay a penny. How revitalising it is to be rewarded for my hard work with an unmissable opportunity like this.

As for Egypt, the Unreported World documentary that I was heavily involved with during my internship (on sexual harassment in Egypt) will be broadcast on Channel 4 within the next couple of weeks. I’ll post a link to it here when it becomes available. With regard to my separate, feature-length documentary on the topic, it’s going to take some time to get off the ground.

In the meantime, I’m keen to take on new projects and challenges – starting with Lithuania. I’m young and excited about my burgeoning career in TV production (especially factual/documentary programming), and, after a really tough few months, I really want to start having fun. I want to carve a new identity for myself, and not simply labour under the label of ‘that journalist who got attacked in Egypt’. I’m still committed to the documentary in the future, but I also want to feel happy and free and enjoy the new directions my life is taking. I’m really looking forward to 2013 as an opportunity to put a lot of hard times, pre- and post-Egypt, behind me. I’ve never really felt that way before, eagerly awaiting the New Year as a chance to leave the old one behind. Perhaps it is, sadly, part of growing up: having good years and bad years, and learning to put the bad years to bed.

I got a Distinction in my Masters!

I got a Distinction in my Masters in International Journalism!

And I finished editing my footage from Cairo to use in the trailer for the new documentary!

For anyone who didn’t catch it the first time, click here for a link to the article on sexual harassment in Egypt that formed part of my Masters.

That’s all, really!

Autumn Update

Autumn’s on the horizon and it’s looking all right.

Unreported World was brilliant. Worked with a fantastic, friendly team who integrated me into all the team discussions and welcomed my ideas. I’m itching to give more details of what I got up to while I was there, but that’ll have to wait until the new season is aired in about 6 weeks’ time, I’m afraid! All very hush hush until then.

As for the Egypt documentary, I’m compiling a trailer at the moment from the footage I managed to salvage from my first week in Cairo. I’ll post the trailer on my blog when it’s completed, so stay tuned! The trailer will be used to help pitch the documentary for funding from various organisations. This is going to be a very long-term project, as there’ll be many stages in the development of the documentary. I’m confident it’ll be worth the wait, though! The main thing is that the pre-production process is in motion.

Recently, I’ve jumped aboard the job-hunting train, which is chugging along monotonously and seems to be breaking down every few minutes. But pretty much everyone is in the same boat, as it’s a damn tough time to be breaking into any industry. Oh how I never tire of hearing politicians and reporters remind the youth of today how screwed we are in terms of getting a job, building a career, and becoming a first-time buyer – if the depressing outlook conveyed on the news is close to reality, I’d better resign myself to living at home till I’m 45.

Hopefully we’ll all get there in the end. Yet I can’t help but feel a shared sense of frustration at having ticked all the boxes, attained all the right qualifications, following the enticing trail of breadcrumbs of possibility, and still being snubbed by employers who are looking to scrimp and save. And don’t even get me started on the growing prominence of exploitative, unpaid internships. I’m fed up of reading the same buzzwords and hearing the same cliched selling points churned out again and again to promote exploitative positions to eager graduates. “A great opportunity to gain experience and boost your CV” is just a euphemism for “you can’t  get a paid job in this recession, so let us take advantage of your skills for a while. Come on, it’s good for you! It’s a challenge.”

Rant over. Check back soon for further updates!

 

Is this Egypt?

Here’s a link to my published article on the sexual harassment of women in Egypt.

Thank you so much to everyone who shared their stories with me. This really is only the beginning!

http://www.fairobserver.com/article/natasha-smith-is-this-egypt