"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 um some of them couldn'..."

"nearly 811 million people worldwide are hungry today and 45 million people are on the edge of famine across 43 countries how do you feel how do you make sense of that many people suffering from hunger..."

"you know your history um and we all know that you know deeply embedded in the geneva conventions post world war ii the intent of one of those articles was to ban the use of starvation as a weapon of w..."

"i sitting here didn't eat for three days um 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..."

"own ability to eat and survive but your families 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 suppo..."

"for their actions so the leaders that start the war so you when you say we have to speak up about the the decisions and the humans making those decisions yeah that lead to the stuff for example let's ..."

"you know she was not starving she her mother was being starved right because of the blockade over the country now who instituted that blockade mbs in saudi arabia with the reinforcement and sort of ta..."

"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 uh..."

"who are the bad guys 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 um doing causing suffering in the world in th..."

"by air that the saudis use continuously to pummel northern yemen um when i was there uh the the sheer volume of air strikes is is hard to describe and we show the result of only one in the film really..."

"know is not the rule of saudi arabia he is he's the crown prince and sorry to interrupt often but who is he as a man what's your sense of yeah so you know i've never met him and i i likely will never ..."

"beyond imagining on mbs 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 m..."

"from afar right and and after i go through that process i still don't think there's any way that one can justify what they've done we're going to talk about each of those people for sure well i'm not ..."

"people a lot of times will ask me if they've seen hunger ward you know um they asked where the hope is right you you read the byline earlier the last hope and what i try to focus on in in many of my f..."

"to save a child i mean in my view nothing is more important than that action maybe on that point real quick so there is suffering at scale starvation at scale there's i mean the numbers um maybe you c..."

"i 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 right so we've been sitting here how long ..."

"makia for example i saw her in the north of the country it's an incredibly rural clinic that she works at so so it's like a magnet for all the cases in the north of the country people come from hundre..."

"bring back to uh a western audience and and you know i i i've filmed many difficult things over the years and um usually i really love filming and i didn't love filming hunker ward it was not a a proc..."

"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 the practitioners were trying to bring them back ..."

"like i am not static in that sense right and preformed it's just 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..."

"omama that capacity for compassion is there even within a ten-year-old girl who's starving right and so so you asked what changed me um that's one moment right i i rather than being crushed by such he..."

"just and and then you to really understand it you have to know the language so i guess i'm asking were you able to really feel the humans on the other side of the language i'd like to think so i mean ..."

"country and um you know we built international humanitarian law for a reason right many years ago and it continues to be written to this day and it's there to prevent what's happening in ukraine right..."

"there are certain kinds of things that captivate the global attention and it seems like starvation is not always one of them for some reason murder and destruction gets people attention more it's the ..."

"and so i i really before i filmed hunger ward i i struggled to sort of answer how we could creatively approach that because you know someone sitting in a clinic right starving or being treated for sta..."

"with it i mean i see this all the time like when you're struggling you can't feed your family you lost your home the last thing you have is jokes about humor yes humans it's like the fucking man fucke..."

"there's that that's gonna set up a whole nother strain on sort of the the global sort of resources that that come into play to deal with refugees you know there were 79 million displaced people on thi..."

"think that's what a military ought to be used for beyond just defending our borders is to is to save others with the privilege that that power affords what do you think about the power of the military..."

"that blockade now there's a two-month ceasefire in place now but remains lifted beyond the ceasefire and children will stop starving that's pretty simple you can trace it's a direct connection and we ..."

"suffering there what do we do to lessen the suffering of the people under authoritarian regimes again the same question military conflict diplomacy sanctions all those kinds of things uh is does that ..."

"doing it in the way i wish you were he certainly has taken a different stand on ukraine um you know and been very vocal but there's so many instances we could talk about where i feel like um the the p..."

"authoritarian regimes yes right there there are individuals have so much power exactly right so you know um you know if putin is is you know put on trial in the hague at some point or at least there's..."

"and help people understand the impact that these geopolitical decisions have on real people's lives and that's the that that's the intent i create each film with now how i choose each story that's the..."

"top top three yeah i love the humor throughout this i really i really appreciate it it's making we're talking about such dark topics it resets the mind in a way that allows me to think so thank you as..."

"keep like uh p people tell me there's the right way to do stuff like here's these giant cases with all kinds of padding for transporting stuff i transport most of the equipment in a garbage bag yeah s..."

"can zoom lens it's not a prime lens so it's not a fixed focal length right because a fixed focal length you have to move a lot more in order to capture action with with a zoom lens um you know maybe a..."

"know talking about some of these leaders and conversations with them it's almost like staring your life into the direction of the difficult of like taking the leap and uh if you're a good human being ..."

"want to do is start you know doing stories about dandelions right there's far more important things to do on this very limited time that i have on the planet and you know i think that that um that's c..."

"you but it came out of this interesting moment very personal moment right lifeboat and hunger ward were completely different um and i had to really work hard to gain access to those stories so you int..."

"film the next time how do you gain people's trust like for example there's a line between journalists and documentary filmmakers nobody really trusts journalists but a documentary filmmaker of course ..."

"not a tech geek um but because during the bulk of my career i um i've worked as a director of photography myself for other people in order to pay the bills over the years um you know i know the techni..."

"and nimble yeah and uh what about lighting do you usually use natural light do you ever do i mean sorry for the technical questions here but um highlighting the drama of the human face yeah uh that's ..."

"so just just so you know this room uh is is like a violation of the basic principles of of using the sun so behind the large curtains are giant windows yeah so this whole should i rip them open [Laugh..."

"us filming most of the time i haven't seen all the footage because in the field it's all about just filming right and then just transferring the footage and getting on safely you know clone to multipl..."

"creations for me that's so cool to to know what we have uh just to lay it all out and to load it in into your mind yeah because like this is the capture of reality we have it's a very kind of scientif..."

"or do you is it always like an incremental step towards better and better it's incremental yeah it's incremental yeah and there's always some moment in the editing process where there's a breakthrough..."

"and sorry to interrupt but when you say craft do you mean just the raw technical the director of photography like the filming aspect is it the storytelling is the acts is the whole thing i think craft..."

"right to shape story to shape narrative to shape performances so i think it was a much more natural fit for me was i excellent at the beginning heck no no you know i think few people are but i learned..."

"couple i did a couple voyages around the world for this group called semester at sea that has a floating university that where they go out three and a half months at a time with the with about 500 col..."

"completely different different endeavor altogether but doing it yourself what do you think about that even though you i you have that trillion dollars oh i have that trillion dollars against write tha..."

"found is that by having another human being i'm filming with who i'm co-shooting with it frees me up as a director to not always have to be shooting either i can do all the other work to build relatio..."

"was a single human being who created that film with with um with a collaborator or subject so it can be done it's just not how i work best yeah how much personally with the other person how important ..."

"but i feel like there's so many ways to tell the same non-fiction that it's borderline on fiction yeah this is well it's storytelling and how much shaping do you see yourself as as doing like how impo..."

"actually that's an interesting little so they say something to the camera that they consent or they sign the thing yeah so for example you know i think the large you know broadcast companies have this..."

"day-to-day minute to minute because that can change absolutely and it does change you mentioned uh a woman captured what the this is i'm sure you can't answer that but i will force you uh what are the..."

"according to his paradigm then we should have just filmed and um i didn't anticipate that moment beforehand i had no sort of foreknowledge that i was going to find myself faced with that dilemma of th..."

"moments like that that's beautifully beautifully put but i also think like you could be a human being in small ways too like silly ways and put a little bit of yourself in in documentaries i i tend to..."

"in that way as you know i i don't do that in a big way but you know i actually there are subtle moments where i allow that presence to live just for a second like i hate belly button docs that's what ..."

"unimportant what is important is what's happening what's unfolding in the world that we need to act upon and right and i think it's selfish and narcissistic to to you know push myself into these stori..."

"well let me ask you about lifeboat because it's extremely i i don't um it's a really moving um idea just just the fact that this exists in the world that there's uh as a metaphor as a reality that the..."

"lift up and showcase the asylum seeker crisis in the mediterranean when it was at its height um in 2016. and um it came to be for many reasons but but one of those reasons is is um colleagues in the n..."

"community sprung up um and it was civil society based that that tried to meet the needs of those asylum seekers to to just ensure that fellow human beings weren't drowning simply put and one of those ..."

"story there and as it turned out there was have you ever saved someone's life as as a part of making these documentaries directly and directly i think you probably have countless lives but directly we..."

"decisions about how how to live that duality right of being a humanitarian and a filmmaker simultaneously and the the greatest example i can share of that was with my director of photography in that p..."

"and his camera was nowhere to be seen yeah right and so i walked over to him and i just grabbed him by the shoulders and said kenny where is your camera and he didn't know he had no idea where his cam..."

"don't you think as a documentary filmmaker the fear is a really good signal for potentially a good thing to do because there's a story there so is fear is an indicator that you shouldn't do it or is i..."

"time 50 feet from syria i i would love to talk at least a little bit about this film first can you high level can you tell what this documentary is about yeah it was early in the syrian uprising and w..."

"so in this film there's a man who crosses the border every day to retrieve the wounded and fair them safety and care and you also mentioned about heroism in the united states um can you tell me about ..."

"and and and he saw the medical need in particular and how hard it was to get people in desperate medical conditions across the border where there was a clinic just right across the border but because ..."

"receive the most desperate medical cases that were coming from all over um northern syria right to receive medical treatment and he would as you see in the film he would ferry them into the back of hi..."

"other human beings i mean if you draw parallels to schindler i feel like the fascinating thing about uh schindler is that he's kind of a flawed human and he's not the kind of human that does these thi..."

"the release of movies and me as a consumer you know uh with netflix with youtube you know that's one of the reasons i'm a huge fan of youtube is it's like out in the open yeah access or especially his..."

"really kind of torn by this whole thing anyway that's the discussion for perhaps another time but the the short question is why is it so hard to watch your documentaries and other films other incredib..."

"platforms are i mean they're not they're not as easily accessible because you have to like yeah you have to use you have to think and you have to chase a particular you have to chase it yeah yeah yeah..."

"and on tick tock no there's different platforms for that this is a place called youtube i'll teach you about it okay yeah i've never heard of it it's a good place to publish documentaries i think i yo..."

"because you can just open up tech talk and keep scrolling so it that that's just something to say about platforms because i think the things that need platforms the most are things like your films the..."

"but also right go out and shoot the next film yes right so that longevity question is also an issue and and the finances are part of that sort of equation that i constantly have to rewrite over and ov..."

"before hunger ward um i would just take a flyer on my films right where i would just say this this meets the so wet threshold this is a story that has to be told and and i want i want to tell it um an..."

"do that with hunger ward luckily i had funders um for that film yeah yeah take risks in this life it's gonna pay off which reminds me of let me ask you i already asked you for advice about for a filmm..."

"react to this given given sort of your expertise but i i would say um oh put down the smartphone yes step away from the monitor right because real life is not a screen right i believe that sort of the..."

"live right i think we're in danger right now of living in a world where if the satellites stop functioning right um then a whole lot of people become completely dysfunctional right because we're so re..."

"my training in the theater has served me so well in the documentary world right because it's all about interaction and listening and talking and dialogue right and that's what i do in documentaries ri..."

"speaks to the nature of human experience right and i return to it all the time because there's wisdom there you know but but there's uh many many books so fiction or non-fiction what what connects wit..."

"what have been you've observed suffering darker aspects of human nature in your own personal life what has been some of the darkest moments in your life darkest times in your life is there something t..."

"if we zoom out you were just one human that witnessed that that trauma you you one human that witnessed so much suffering in different parts of the world and as we zoom out across space and time and l..."