Vanya Kewley

Early life

Kewley was born on 8 November 1937 in Calcutta (now Kolkata), India. She was the daughter of a French mother and her British-born father was a diplomat. Kewley was handed her father's enthusiasm for studying comparative Asian religions and the Sanskrit language. She was educated in India, France and Switzerland primarily in Roman Catholic schools. Kewley read philosophy and history at the Sorbonne which was the historical house of the University of Paris. She left before her first year was completed and instead moved to London to train as a registered nurse, working at the Charing Cross Hospital's casualty department.

Career

Having not much content with nursing, Kewley started to write for the local London newspapers in her spare time before becoming ambitious over journalism on television. She later said of the start of her career, "I began knocking on every studio door I could find until someone asked me inside." Kewley joined Granada Television in 1965 as a researcher for the regional news programme. She later became a producer and director on the current affairs programme World in Action between 1968 and 1971. In 1969, during her first foreign assignment and living without permission amongst "freedom fighters" Kewley was captured and beaten by soldiers while making a film about the problem of genocide in South Sudan. She narrowly avoided being raped by her captors. Kewley took a film crew into Nigeria in 1970 when the country was under civil war and secured an exclusive interview with the Biafran forces leader C. Odumegwu Ojukwu that same year.

She switched to the ITV current affairs series This Week in 1972 and made several documentaries for the programme. This included an assignment to Vietnam during the war there where Kewley contracted infective hepatitis and liver abscesses while filming in the countries jungle war areas and evaded fire from Vietcong forces. She interviewed the exiled spirtual leader of Tibet the Dalai Lama at his home in the Himalayas for the 1975 film The Lama King and this formed a lifelong friendship. Kewley had a spell with the BBC and partook in the religious and ethics series Anno Domini between 1975 and 1977 and Everyman from 1977 to 1978.

She also interviewed the leader of Libya Muammar Gaddafi in the film Soldier for Islam in 1976 (updated two years later). That same year, she revealed through her documentary Paradise Lost the widespread use of torture in Paraguay. She won her first prize at the Montreux Festival in 1977 for a documentary about the human rights situation in South Korea filmed two years earlier. The following year, Kewley was awarded the BBC Director General’s Award for Special Services to Television. She documented the resurgence of Islam in Saudi Arabia in 1979 and calculated what economic and political implications this would have for the Western world. Kewley investigated the issue of physical abuse of babies in the United Kingdom in the 1980 film Rosie's Story.

Tibet: A Case to Answer

In 1985, Kewley was disturbed over the human rights situation in Tibet and started to establish contacts in the country. She persuaded Channel 4's commissioning editor David Lloyd to fund the channel's most expensive documentary at the time, for the current affairs series Dispatches. Kewley entered Tibet with a guided tourist group and then deserted. She shared amateur filming equipment with the American cinematographer Sean Bobbitt but her plans were disintegrating after entering China on a three-month tourist visa as transport links were cancelled. Kewley joined Bobbitt in Chengdu as part of group touring the Tibetan capital Lhasa for five days and discovered that natives were outnumbered by Chinese citizens in their own country. Following more delays, she replaced her translator since she was concerned that Bobbitt was a collaborator and filmed interviews that divulged the human rights abuses by the ruling Chinese authorities.

Kewley filmed alone when Bobbitt left after becoming ill and continued her 4,000 miles (6,400 km) journey by van into the region's interior and discovered babies being born with deformities near a nuclear plant with one Chinese doctor admitting to performing enforced abortions and sterilisations. She persuaded a French mountaineer to smuggle the majority of the film footage out of Tibet before leaving on her own flight. The resulting film, Tibet: A Case to Answer, received much attention after its first broadcast on Channel 4 in 1988 and was repeated twice more in the following months. It was also specially shown to members of the Houses of Parliament, the United States Congress and the European Parliament. The film drew repeated protests from Beijing and Chinese ambassadors declined offers to debate the film live on air with Kewley. She also courted controversy by interviewing her subjects without disguises but she responded that she attempted to persuade the interviewees to hide their identifies but they chose not to.

Later life and death

In 1990, Kewley's only book entitled Tibet: Behind the Ice Curtain was published. She returned to Tibet in 1991 by smuggling herself into the country across the Himalayas hidden beneath the floorboards of a van to create the follow-up to Tibet: A Case to Answer, entitled Voices from Tibet shown on Channel 4. Kewley revealed martial law was still present in Tibet despite claims from China that it had been ended. She stopped producing documentaries when she was diagnosed with parkinson's disease in 1993. However Kewley returned to Charing Cross Hospital in the early 1990s to undertake a refresher course before travelling to perform work for the Red Cross in Bosnia and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. She adopted and sponsored the education of two girls from Tibet and one boy from Rwanda. In 2000, Kewley married soil scientist Michael Lambert and the marriage ended with Lambert's death from bone cancer four years later. She died on 17 July 2012. Her adoptive children survive her.