After many years of receiving a considerable amount of foreign aid, Haiti remains an impoverished and politically fragile state. AIDependence tells the story of the controversial relationship between the people of Haiti and international aid organisations, and exposes the negative side effects of the aid industry, including dependency, corruption, and the corrosion of solidarity and the economy.

Alice Smeets‘ documentary follows Robi, a young Haitian from the poorest slum in the western hemisphere, Cité Soleil, and Sabina, his American girlfriend and former aid worker. Together they work to change the traditional system of aid and are partisans of “Konbit Soley Leve”, a movement which aims to mobilise Haitian communities in solving issues related to healthcare and access to resources.

Through interviews with aid workers, economists, and Haitian activists, AIDependence breaks down stereotypes about non-governmental organisations, aid and poverty in order to shed light on the various models of international aid, and why some seem to work better than others. Using the example of Haiti, the country with the most NGOs per capita, Alice Smeets presents a well-informed analysis of how development projects can give rise to cycles of dependence rather than long-term solutions.

Directed by Alice Smeets
Duration: 90′
Year: 2014

From Somalia to Iraq, Haiti to Columbia and many places in between, filmmakers What Took You So Long? do not only make films – they explore, connect and collaborate with communities worldwide.

Ahead of their distinguished Guerrilla Filmmaking Workshop at the Frontline Club, we caught up with the team for an exclusive Q&A:

First of all, will participants have the opportunity to make a film during the workshop?
YES!

How do you define guerrilla filmmaking?
Guerrilla filmmaking is about going in without an agenda, integrating with local communities and using the smallest amount of gear necessary. It’s about being able to convey compelling stories without lights, boom or massive cameras.

What have you been able to achieve which you wouldn’t have by “proper” methods?
Connection: to the people we film and the people we work with. The small effort to take a local bus, or finding a fixer/translator at an internet cafe gets you started in the process of participatory filmmaking.

Where has been your most challenging and/or inspiring location to film?
Somalia is challenging day-to-day because you’re never entirely sure that you’ll be safe. Most inspiring is hard to choose, but WTYSL’s recent journeys to Haiti have given us an in-depth look at a very stereotyped country. Western Sahara was problematic due to Moroccan secret service thinking we worked for Human Rights Watch. Uzbekistan was tough because our hosts thought we worked for the BBC and we had to escape.

How did you go about working in Somalia?
Filming the TEDxSummit in Doha motivated us to organise the first TEDx event in Somalia. TEDx Mogadishu inspired UNDP Somalia to contact us, and together we created the Social Good Summit Mogadishu. This lead to our visual capacity training with the UNDP, where we explored with local staff how they could use film and photography to share their work with the world.

How do you decide which organisations to work with?
It’s an organic process that comes from a lot of discussion with the potential partner. But our reputation is a good filter. We don’t often have to say no, because we don’t often get approached by people with missions incongruous to ours.

What’s the story with TEDx?
Sebastian was invited to speak about guerrilla filmmaking at TEDx Athens, and then about camel milk entrepreneurship at TEDx NHH in Norway. At TEDx Doha we met Nate, who was organising the whole conference. He is now an essential part of WTYSL. We like to think we stole him from TED.

Who could join WTYSL?
Anyone with a passion for filmmaking, nomadism and learning. Alicia and Sebastian are amazing teachers. You can tell by the makeup of the current WTYSL that we are all very different. We bring different things to the table and that keeps things interesting.

What’s most exciting about the workshop?
You’ll actually make something. The biggest barrier to break is the one that says we’ll be wasting our time and fail. In filmmaking you have to step outside of your comfort zone and do what’s right for the film.

Participants will get connected to our contacts in over 60 countries, and we’ll help get you kickstarted on your way to making great content.

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The comprehensive two-day workshop will cover both technical know-how and guerrilla filmmaking strategies. From live-streaming, iPhone apps (time lapse, photography, quality audio etc.), storyboarding and editing on the road – to finding accommodation (not hotels), inspiring the uninspired and incorporating laughing yoga into your visual life – this one of a kind workshop may change the way you connect to people.

Guerrilla Filmmaking with WTYSL will be held The Frontline Club on Saturday 29 & Sunday 30 June 2013. Click here for more information.

Bring your camera, wear comfortable shoes, and don’t forget your imagination!

All image credits: What Took You So Long?

On 12 January 2010 the deadliest earthquake ever recorded in the western hemisphere hit Haiti, claiming between 230,000 and 300,000 lives. As aid organisations flooded the country there was an unprecedented outpouring from the international community, and $15.3 billion was pledged for relief and reconstruction.

We will be joined by a panel of experts from the humanitarian aid community and reporters who covered the earthquake and the subsequent reconstruction efforts, to examine why – after three years and $15.3 billion – the country is still in crisis.

In a recent development, cholera victims in Haiti are threatening to sue the UN, accusing them of negligently allowing peacekeeping soldiers to pollute Haiti’s water with cholera. We will be asking how the situation went so wrong and have the lessons been learned.

Chaired by Inigo Gilmore, an award winning journalist and filmmaker who has worked across the world, with extensive experience in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

The panel:

Jonathan Katz is a writer and reporter, he is author of The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster. He has written for the AP for six years, stationed in Haiti for nearly three and a half years and was the only American reporter in the country when the earthquake hit on 12 January 2010. He is the 2010 recipient of the Medill Medal of Courage in Journalism and the 2012 winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for this book.

Andy Leak is professor of French and Francophone Studies at University College London. His current research centres on literature and politics in Haiti since 1986. He is also secretary of the Haiti Support Group – a UK-based not-for-profit which seeks to amplify the voices of progressive Haitian CSOs in Europe and N. America. He is one of the editors of the quarterly Haiti Briefing.

Arjan Hehenkamp is a general director of Medecins Sans Frontieres (for the Dutch section) and has twenty years experience of humanitarian work around the world since starting in Somalia in 1993. Since 2006 he has been ultimately responsible for much of MSF’s work in Haiti as well as many other countries. MSF has been working in Haiti since 1991 and currently runs substantial medical programmes in the country.

Mario Gousse is a Haitian-born science teacher based in the UK. He is a member of the Haiti Support Group Executive Committee.  He has helped to found the education charity UHUK (United Haitians in the United Kingdom) and currently serves as their Education Officer.  He is a student and observer of Haitian history, politics and culture.

The international editor for ITV News, Bill Neely delivered a fascinating masterclass in television journalism last night at the Frontline Club.

Part of a regular series of ‘Reflections’ events in association with the BBC College of Journalism, in which top journalists talk about their work and those who inspired them, the hour-and-half event was a mine of information and expert analysis on how to best make use of words, pictures and sound – and silence.

A must-watch for aspiring journalists and those who want to improve their game, the event includes insight into some of the key moments in TV journalism history since the 1980s, including the Bosnian war of 1992 to 1995. In the face of the atrocities carried out during that conflict, some journalists including the BBC correspondent Martin Bell and Ed Vulliamy decided that detachment was no longer possible and instead opted for the “journalism of attachment”, Neely explained.

He also analysed his colleague Penny Marshall’s use of words and pictures in a 1992 report from a Serb-run detention camp in Bosnia, which opens with Marshall saying ‘We were not prepared for what we saw there’. “Then for 18 seconds, she said nothing,” said Neely.

The report won the International News Award for 1992 at the Royal Television Society TV Journalism Awards but was caught up in a “storm” after Living Marxism magazine claimed that the video tapes were faked.

ITN successfully sued the magazine for libel but some people “still had not forgiven” BBC world affairs editor John Simpson’s decision to give evidence for the magazine, Neely said.

After showing one of his earlier reports from Newry while he was the BBC’s Northern Ireland correspondent, Neely examined the work of a number of journalists from ITV News, including Colin Baker and Paul Davis and the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen and Martin Bell.

Good journalists are able to use words to “grab a person by the lapels and never let them go,” said Neely,  who talked about the different approaches used by journalists, including Bell, who did not script his reports.

Drawing on a career that had seen him cover stories around the world from the fall of the Berlin wall to the Haiti earthquake and fighting in Libya, Neely also discussed the use of sound, pointing out the differences in the way  ITV News and the BBC reported from Dunblane massacre in March 1996.

Neely highlighted Baker’s report that showed school children leaving the primary school where 16 of their classmates and a teacher were shot dead. Ove the images, the former senior correspondent said: “Evil touched them, but just brushed past.”

During the report the sound of grieving parents could be heard from a building behind him but at no point did Baker draw attention to it, Neely said. “I think there are times when you just don’t need to,” he added.

The award-winning journalist, who picked up BAFTA’s three years in a row, contrasted different reporting styles from the BBC correspondent Kate Adie’s “icily detached” approach to the more conversational style of his colleague Tom Bradby, political editor of ITV News.

Neely talked the audience through step by step through his report from Haiti that won him his most recent BAFTA  last year. The report was shown in three parts and Neely highlighted different aspects of the package, which Ray pointed out broke with accepted wisdom of “using your best pictures first”.

Part two of the interview is here:

This report by Bill Neely showing the incredible rescue of Janette Samfour from the ruins of Port-au-Prince in January 2010 won the ITV News international editor a news coverage BAFTA in the same year.

Referring to the "art of the news package" BBC political editor Nick Robinson recently described Bill Neely as one of "the great artists" who could "turn television into magic and use words and pictures like few other people do".

To illustrate his point, Robinson chose Bill Neely‘s reporting of the rescue of Janette Samfour six days after the 12 January earthquake in Haiti, adding that: 

It’s easy to say that anybody who stumbles across somebody whose survived an earthquake could tell that story. Don’t you believe it. It reminds me of that old gag about footballers, the more I practice, the luckier I get. Bill Neely’s either bloody lucky because he still keeps coming across these amazing dramas, or he’s bloody good, and I know which one I think.

That capacity to see that one story as a statement of the wider thing and to stick with it.  Remember, he’s there for three hours, the temptation for the reporter would be to think ‘OK, that’s quite good, let’s get another sequence, then let’s do a piece to camera, then let’s do an ariel shot’.  But to come across this human drama and say let’s stick with it, the amount of guts that takes, with the newsroom saying, is this going to make a piece? What happens if she’d died? Would that make a piece? Or if they got her out in the dark? But he had that instinct to stick with it, stick with it, tell the story. 

Find out more about Bill Neely and his career – and pick up some advice on the craft of television journalism – at our Reflections event on 29 June. You can book here.

David Levene spoke at the Frontline Club on Friday to Roger Tooth, head of photography for the Guardian, about videoing and photographing the earthquake in Haiti. We were joined live from Port-au-Prince by Inigo Gilmore, who reported in the aftermath of the earthquake for Channel 4.

If you missed the event you can watch it here.

Upon his return from Haiti, David Levene put together an exhibition and print sale of his work from both before and after the earthquake in aid of the Disasters Emergency Committee’s Haiti Earthquake Appeal. You can view some of David’s pictures in the Guardian gallery here. Prints can still be ordered by contacting picture.syndication@guardian.co.uk

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The devastation in Port-au-Prince following January’s earthquake sent harrowing images of its victims around the world.

Inigo Gilmore and David Levene were among the scores of journalists whose job it was to document the suffering and chaos in the aftermath of the earthquake.

Following an exhibition of his work from both before and after the earthquake in aid of the Disasters Emergency Committee’s Haiti Earthquake Appeal, David Levene, Guardian photographer and video-journalist, will be joined on the Frontline stage by Inigo Gilmore via video link from Haiti. These two accomplished journalists will be in conversation with Roger Tooth, head of photography for the Guardian.

The discussion will focus on the role of photographers and videojournalists in such tragedies and the decisions that are made about what is published.

Were the images of death and suffering too shocking to be shown in the first place or were journalists merely carrying out their duty as chroniclers of world events?

For some, newspapers and news channels were guilty of veering towards publishing "disaster pornography" in their coverage and violating the dignity of the dead.

Others criticised the media for over-exagerating reports of mass looting and for many the ethical barriers to publishing pictures of dead bodies, sometimes on a mass scale, are just too great.

However, unfortunate as it may be, simply reading about how many people have died or how many buildings have been destroyed does not have the same impact than if you saw a photograph.

Some would ask why the rest of the world should be sheltered from what is happening when the people of Haiti have no such option.

There will be a discussion on Haiti and photography at the Frontline Club on April 16 with Roger Tooth, head of journalism at The Guardian and Guardian photographer and video-journalist David Levene and Inigo Gilmore. Book here.

That was the broad consensus from panelists at a lively First Wednedsday debate at the Frontline Club, who chewed over the complex business of getting aid to the people that need it and how to rebuild the country.

Here are audio interviews with three of our panelists on what they think of the media coverage of the situation so far…

Back on the panel, BBC journalist Orin Gordon – who has for years reported from Haiti – said: "What the media does is simplify things very, very much… I’d say we’re all guilty of that." He pointed out, however, that the BBC was helping Haitians by setting up a Creole-language radio service based in Miami.

But reporters can play a positive role too: Astrid Zweynert, deputy editor of the Reuters-owned AlertNet news service, warned that the extreme class divide in Haiti could be widen even further by the earthquake and said she hoped "this is where the media has a role to play."

The challenge for journalists now, according to Christian Wisskirchen from the Haiti Support Group, is to make sure that the voice of real Haitians is heard, ahead of the forthcoming conference of donor nations in New York. "All this stuff you will hear nothing about unless people give a voice to the peasant co-operatives, women’s groups and everyone in Haiti needs to be heard."

There was no disagreement that the task facing Haiti is massive – with aid bottlebecks, a lack of communications and an unanswered need to properly audit and account for the vast sums of aid dollars flowing in daily.

Some panelists and crowd members highlighted a sinister side to the US military’s lead role in stabilising and rebuilding the country. "I think the neo-colonial metaphor is quite good," said Peter Hallward, a professor of modern European philosophy at Middlesex University and an author on Haiti.

"The powers that be pushed the military agenda quite hard early on… they controlled the airport early on, they used the resoucres they had they used in terms of what can be secured."

Hallward went further and said the US-led forces’ attempts to control the country were outweighing the emergency efforts to distribute aid and rebuild Haiti. The US army looked for "places you could put a fence around with a bunch of guys with guns… the rest were left in the rubble."

Here’s our podcast from the evening: