Fitzgerald, Skye

two-time Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker; director of Hunger Ward, Lifeboat, and 50 Feet from Syria

Skye Fitzgerald: Hunger, War, and Human Suffering

Lex Fridman Podcast · Apr 20, 2022

• Skye Fitzgerald
• Hunger Ward documentary
• Yemen war and Saudi blockade
• starvation as a weapon of war
• Lifeboat and Mediterranean refugee crisis
• 50 Feet from Syria
• documentary filmmaking ethics and consent
• cinema verité vs. intervention
• MBS and Khashoggi accountability
• mortality and meaning

Core ideas

Fitzgerald describes making Hunger Ward to document child starvation in Yemen, framing it as the direct result of the Saudi-led coalition's blockade and air campaign against Houthi-controlled northern Yemen — a war he characterizes as highly asymmetrical (Saudi air power against a Houthi force with no air capability) and sustained, in his account, by Mohammed bin Salman with US and European arms support. He states his view that starvation is being used deliberately as a weapon of war in Yemen, Ethiopia, and Ukraine despite international humanitarian law explicitly prohibiting it since the post-WWII Geneva Conventions, and argues the international community has the legal framework to prevent this but lacks the political will to enforce it — citing the Biden administration's response to the CIA's assessment of MBS's responsibility for Jamal Khashoggi's killing as an example of maintaining strategic relationships over stated moral commitments.

He describes his filmmaking approach as deliberately focusing on individual caregivers — nurse practitioner Makia and pediatrician Dr. Aida al-Sadiq — rather than statistics, to avoid what he calls "psychic numbing" in the face of large-scale suffering (citing the statistic that a child was dying of hunger in Yemen roughly every 75 seconds during filming), and recounts witnessing a malnourished infant, Asula, die during filming, which he felt an obligation to document faithfully. He also describes a formative moment while filming a severely malnourished ten-year-old girl, Omama, who — while still recovering herself — offered water to a younger, equally starving child, which he says reinforced his belief in humans' inherent capacity for compassion even under extreme deprivation.

On Lifeboat, covering civilian rescue operations for asylum seekers crossing from Libya toward Europe, Fitzgerald describes a pivotal ethical moment when he and his crew chose to stop filming and physically pull drowning people from the water rather than document a death — a choice he says permanently shifted his prior adherence to a strict "fly on the wall" cinema verité philosophy (modeled on Frederick Wiseman) toward prioritizing being "a human being first and a filmmaker second." He connects this to an earlier personal experience: as a young man, he witnessed a fatal multi-car accident and froze, failing to go comfort a dying woman out of fear, an experience he describes as one of the defining failures of his life and the origin of his subsequent resolve to intervene whenever able, regardless of his role as an observer.

Fitzgerald discusses the practical and ethical craft of documentary filmmaking: working in minimal two-person crews to preserve intimacy and access in sensitive settings (citing filming Hunger Ward with just himself and a director of photography), using long zoom lenses and natural light to avoid disrupting vulnerable moments, and rejecting standardized written consent forms in favor of ongoing, relationship-based verbal consent — particularly important, he notes, when working with subjects who cannot read or write. He describes a three-stage creative process ("three creations"): his initial pre-production vision, the real-time creative adaptation required during filming, and a final re-envisioning built from a detailed shot-by-shot review log after returning from the field. On 50 Feet from Syria, he recounts documenting a Turkish civilian who used his own money and relationship-building with border guards to ferry wounded Syrians across the border for medical treatment, whom Fitzgerald compares to Oskar Schindler as an example of ordinary, self-motivated heroism.

Discussing risk, Fitzgerald states he avoids armed security in conflict zones like Yemen because visible security details make a target of the crew, preferring to rely on the (imperfect) protections of international humanitarian law, and describes fear as a natural, useful "alarm bell" rather than something to suppress — arguing that the presence of fear is often itself a signal that a story is worth pursuing. He closes by describing the meaning of his life as trying to leave the world a little better before he dies, citing a line from C.S. Lewis's play Shadowlands about suffering shaping character, and states he lives with awareness of his own mortality as a motivating rather than paralyzing force.

Excerpts