JAPAN PRIZE International Contest For Educational Media

JAPAN PRIZE 2004 : Program Details

The journalist who appeared in this program was brought up in a poor family in Sierra Leone, but has spent the past 10 years living in London where hunger is a thought of the past. He travels to a small village to see how people live with chronic hunger on a day-to-day basis and how some manage to survive. He moves into the remote village that survives without a water system or electricity and experiences the same hunger as the villagers. The daily food is a kind of bread, pea sauce and wild cabbage. In the beginning, the villagers are so afraid of him that they avoid him because of his large size, but little by little, they begin reaching out to him. The flowers that a child presents to him were to welcome him but also to eat.

The villagers share their scant food with the journalist. But when he walks for 35 kilometers, he loses his energy and is carried out the camera crew's van. He confesses that he can not survive and gets some food from the camera crew. In the end, he loses 18 kilograms during this experience.

Hunger amidst world plenty remains one of the most urgent but poorly understood issues in our time. Media coverage in the last 20 years seems to be contributing to "compassion fatigue".

This documentary from CNN, presented by Sorious Samura, uses a modern "reality show" format to get close to the experience of the daily struggle to find food in Ethiopia today. Using the personality and strong communication skills of its presenter it breaks through the stereotype of a famine documentary to challenge our preconceptions and to reveal the human experience of survival with hunger. The program is particularly outstanding in its unflinching recognition of the moral position of media personnel covering famine. It confronts with honesty the ambivalence of a well fed crew recording a community in distress. In doing so, it gives a new viewpoint on the issue and provides the audience with images and situations that both provoke and stay in the mind.

Mr. Ron McCullagh
Executive Producer

"Living with Hunger" was made by a group of people who wanted to find a new way of engaging a large audience with the issues of chronic hunger. Sorious Samura, the presenter and the author of "Surviving Hunger", has known hunger personally, and therefore felt the need to engage with this subject. He shared the wish to make a connection between hungry people and a big audience, with the film's Executive Producer, Ron McCullagh.

Twenty years ago, then BBC reporter, McCullagh, had been deeply affected by the coverage of the 1984 Ethiopian famine. What struck him was the anonymity of the tens of thousands of people who featured in the television coverage of the crisis. His strong belief was that every one of the thousands of hungry people had a story to tell, but that all these stories were lost in the generality of the coverage. The end result, as far as McCullagh was concerned, was that these thousands of people represented an African "victimhoodness" which belied the truth: that many of these people were born survivors, honed in the tough environment in which, for generations, they had survived.

Both Executive Producer and Presenter, therefore, set off with a clear mission in mind. And that mission? To give a real voice to real people living in extraordinarily tough conditions, no longer victims, but instead, true survivors.