Starvation Is a Weapon. Skye Fitzgerald Still Puts the Camera Down.

Lex Fridman opens with a number that should not be possible. Nearly 811 million people are hungry, and 45 million are on the edge of famine across 43 countries. Skye Fitzgerald, a two-time Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker, does not pretend he can make the figure sit still. What disturbs him is not scarcity. The food to feed those people exists, and so do the resources. A large share of those going hungry, he says, are the net result of war and of leaders who choose to starve entire populations.

He reminds Fridman that one aim of the Geneva Conventions after World War II was to ban starvation as a weapon of war, a response to what Hitler had done. International humanitarian law has restated the ban since, including in 2018 because of the Saudi blockade of Yemen. The rule is on the books. Enforcement is not. Starvation is still being used in Ethiopia, in Ukraine, and in Yemen, and Fitzgerald is disgusted that the nation-states who make up the international community will not give the law teeth.

If the two of them did not eat for three days and slept on a sidewalk, he says, they would take hunger and homelessness more seriously. Fridman had recently fasted for three days and found the exercise almost beside the point. The terror is not missing a meal you can choose to take. It is not knowing when the next one comes, and watching someone you are supposed to protect go without. When that hopelessness is inflicted as policy, Fitzgerald wants two things at once: aggressive humanitarian intervention, and political accountability for the people who started the war.

Filming *Hunger Ward* in Yemen, Fitzgerald met a mother who weighed 70 pounds when she gave birth. Her daughter had been starved in the womb, then born into a world with no breast milk and almost no formula. He watched the child, Asila, die in front of him. She had no chance to grow up, to discover love, or to have a career. She was not starving by accident. Her mother was being starved by a blockade, and the blockade was starving the child.

*Hunger Ward* is a short documentary about what Yemen's war does to civilians, shot in both the north and the south of a bifurcated country. The internationally recognized government in the south had, until the week of the conversation, been headed at least on paper by President Hadi, holed up in Riyadh; Fitzgerald says most people would agree the Emiratis and Saudis had just removed him for a presidential council. Starvation looked similar on both sides. Few people in the West know the conflict, or the United States' complicity in it. The film was meant as an intervention, an attempt to change the political status quo that lets starvation continue.

He will not paint the war in cartoon black and white, but he will name bad actors. The Saudi-led coalition — Saudi Arabia and the UAE, with weapons from the United States, France, and Britain — is a wildly asymmetrical air war against Ansar Allah, the Houthi movement, which has drones but no air force. The Saudi line is that the Houthis are illegitimate and that this is a proxy fight with Iran. Fitzgerald's view is blunter: the Houthis do get Iranian support, but the war was started and is sustained by Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince and de facto ruler. He has never met MBS and hopes he never will. From the man's actions in the Middle East and North Africa, Fitzgerald ranks him with Bashar al-Assad and Vladimir Putin as three people who have caused such a volume of misery that the world would be better without them.

Fridman asks whether a filmmaker can live inside a mind like that — whether he can inhabit someone who does evil and still see how that person is the hero of his own story. Fitzgerald's first training was theater; he holds two degrees in it, and walking in other people's shoes is how he works. He can go there with Assad, MBS, and Putin, and think from afar about how they became who they are. After that process, he still finds no way to justify what they have done. Understanding is not forgiveness. It is how a judgment earned in firsthand observation gets its weight.

People who have seen *Hunger Ward* ask him where the hope is. The film's byline is "the last hope between war and starvation," and Fitzgerald looks for it in people doing extraordinary work under impossible conditions. In the north he found Makiya Maji, a nurse practitioner at a small rural clinic. In the south he found Dr. Aida Al-Sadiq, a pediatrician. The story runs through their days as caregivers trying to save a generation born into starvation. A child in Yemen dies of hunger every 75 seconds. They have been talking, he notes, for about 35 minutes. That is already a handful of children. The only way he, or the two clinicians, can keep going is to refuse the psychic numbing of scale and treat the person in front of them.

Both women treat anyone who arrives. No money, no resources, just the ability to reach the door. Makiya's clinic is so rural it acts as a magnet; families travel hundreds of kilometers for pediatric malnutrition care. Fitzgerald watched a male relative bring in a girl. Gender custom required a parent or relative to stay with the child, and many doctors would have turned them away. Makiya walked into a ward, talked another mother into becoming a temporary guardian, and kept the child until a female relative could come. She finds solutions rather than letting the problem block them. One child at a time.

He did not want to film a child dying, and he did not enjoy making *Hunger Ward*. Deaths like Asila's happen every week at that hospital, and when it happened on his watch he felt a duty to do the family's story justice if they wanted it told. One of the hardest parts of the shoot was eating. The therapeutic feeding centers are full of children who have lost the ability to digest ordinary food. Leaving for camp or a hotel, where bread and rice were for sale, became a daily act of attention: look at the bowl, think of the child who cannot eat it, then eat. He would not call it guilt. He calls it mindfulness, and it pushed the team to make the strongest film they could.

The person who changed him was Omeima, a ten-year-old admitted in Aden at 24 pounds, barely able to stand. Over about two and a half weeks of treatment she gained strength, watching the nurses as carefully as they watched her. Fitzgerald walked into a room and found her offering a capful of water to a younger child who was also starving. The shot is in the film. He had expected the material to crush him. Instead a starving girl taught him that people can still choose who they become. Language was a barrier, but he trusts universals more than vocabulary. Salha, unnamed in the film, is the gatekeeper of a ward: no one enters without her, and she meets new families with hugs and food. Near the end, after another child dies and a mother wails, the cut is to Salha in a hallway, walking into another room to sob. She is not family. The weeping needs no translation. She has seen this suffering for a long time and has kept her heart open anyway. That, Fitzgerald thinks, may be how she keeps doing the work.

Fridman's family history includes the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932 and 1933. Fitzgerald's lesson from famines like that is simple and bleak: the bulk of them do not have to exist. A good number are manufactured by leaders who use hunger as a weapon. Ukraine is again an obvious case, with siege tactics in parts of the country. International humanitarian law was built, and is still being written, to prevent exactly what is happening in Ukraine and what has been happening in Yemen for seven years. It has not been given teeth. Starvation, he notes, rarely captivates global attention the way sudden killing does. Death is easy to count. Slow suffering is not.

The Ukraine war will also worsen a displacement crisis his last trilogy of films was already about. There were 79 million displaced people before the invasion; estimates of four to six million more from Ukraine are a significant bump, and the strain on refugee systems will last for years even if the fighting stopped today. In Syria he believes the United States and its partners missed a chance to prevent the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Syrians told him of helicopters dropping 55-gallon drums packed with explosives and shrapnel onto neighborhoods, over and over, with no military target, only killing and fear. Early on, before Russia was fully in, a no-fly zone could have stopped it. The capability existed. It was not used. If words and sanctions fail, he thinks there are moments — barrel bombs on civilians for months — when shooting those helicopters down is justified.

Knowing a just intervention in the moment, rather than ten years later, is brutally hard, which is one reason leaders so often guess wrong. Some cases are not hard. In Yemen, children starve because of a blockade. If the United States ensured the blockade stayed lifted beyond a two-month ceasefire then in place, the starving would stop. The causal chain is short. What is missing is the moral wherewithal, because oil and Saudi influence in the region still outweigh the wound. Fitzgerald is "just a guy with a camera," but the camera has shown him what authoritarian decisions do to citizens. Biden campaigned on recovering a moral place in the world. A CIA report then laid out in detail that MBS was responsible for Jamal Khashoggi's murder, including cutting the body into pieces and likely burning it in an embassy backyard. Biden did not make MBS a pariah. Barring his aircraft from U.S. airspace would have been a concrete, personal humiliation. Individual sanctions of that kind, Fitzgerald argues, land differently in systems where so much power sits in one man — including the mere threat of a Hague trial for Putin, which would at least change his travel plans. Lines, once drawn, ring for other autocrats too.

Fridman, himself a man with cameras and microphones, wants to know how a scholar of suffering chooses a story. Fitzgerald calls the mix a mystery potion: instinct plus a highly intentional filter he names the "do I care" or "so what" threshold. American fascination with reality television disturbs him, even though he once shot a season of it to pay rent. The things he thinks a father and a filmmaker should attend to are children being starved in Yemen and Ukrainians being displaced by the millions. If a subject would not marshal resources and attention toward solving a real problem, it does not clear the bar. He did not pick up a camera to make people smile. He believes it is a tool for change, a way to show what geopolitical decisions do to actual lives.

The next film often grows out of the last one. Relationships from a shoot put a detail in his ear before the story has hit the world stage; due diligence then shows it is larger and more urgent than it first appeared. Access is the premise of almost everything he makes: being in the room, or on the boat, while a crisis unfolds. That access is nuanced and hard-won, and because it is hard-won it dictates the method. In Sadaka Hospital in southern Yemen he cannot put five people in a room or hang a boom over a dying child. Logistically and creatively he wants the opposite. *Hunger Ward* was filmed by two people, Fitzgerald and his director of photography, with a field producer in-country. Long zoom lenses let them tuck into a corner and work from about 15 feet, closer to a fly on the wall, so the caretaking is not interrupted.

Getting there, he says, was harder than filming *Hunger Ward*, *Lifeboat*, or *50 Feet from Syria*. Afterward he cannot walk a U.S. grocery aisle with 50 kinds of canned peas and pretend he does not feel the tension of that privilege. He has a choice about what to do with it, and the last thing he wants is a film about dandelions. Mortality is catalytic. He feels it each day, and the goal is to tell as many of these stories as he can before he is gone.

Every access story is a different adventure. One of the easiest, he says, was *50 Feet from Syria*. He broke his hand in a bicycle race, waited months for a specialist, and finally sat down with a Syrian-American orthopedic surgeon just as the Syrian conflict was beginning. The doctor looked at the hand, said he needed surgery, then stood up and pulled the privacy curtain. A 15-minute slot became an hour of talk. Later the surgeon called: he was going back to the Syrian border to volunteer. Did Fitzgerald want to come? Mysterious confluence happens, and a storyteller has to be open when it does. *Lifeboat* and *Hunger Ward* were the opposite. Those he had to fight for.

Fridman suggests that fascinating people are all around if you stay curious and persistent. Fitzgerald does not claim to be the most talented filmmaker or the smartest person in the room. What has served him is tenacity. He is a slow-burn human being: not home runs, singles to first. He ran a marathon at 18, and he treats that as a picture of the career — keep going, learn, and practice incremental evolution so the next film is a little better than the last. Trust is the other half of access. He draws a line between journalism's "fair and balanced" checklist and filmmaking. Everyone has an agenda; his, on *Hunger Ward*, was to work with civilians and caretakers rather than to interview MBS. He thinks of the people he films as collaborators, not subjects.

Consent, in his practice, is not a paper slid across a table. Broadcast companies like a signed, irrevocable release that will stand up in court. That process collapses if someone is illiterate or cannot sign a name. Fitzgerald would rather have a long conversation, questions both ways, a complete understanding, and then, if they still want to participate, consent spoken to camera in their own language. He hates the paper. Real consent is rebuilt every day and every minute, and it changes. The relationship is the point. The day before the taping, Dr. Al-Sadiq in southern Yemen had sent him photographs of children she was currently treating. They will likely still be in touch years from now. That continuing bond, he says, is the only way he can make films like these.

He is not a tech geek, but he spent much of his career as a director of photography for other people in order to pay bills, so he had to know the tools. Cinema, as he wants it, is visually driven rather than verbally driven, which means the best kit he can carry in a tiny footprint. Fridman offers a joking trillion dollars; Fitzgerald would not buy a giant lens. He would buy a perfect small kit, then train three teams to multiply the kind of work he already does. Lighting is mostly the sun, shaped at the right hour of the day. When they bring instruments they are compact: a three-tube USB-chargeable kit with magnetic backs, used when a hallway at night has no exposure, plus a reflector or two. Electricity is often the constraint. Fridman's studio, sealed behind black curtains over large windows, is a cheerful violation of the principle.

Editing is where Fitzgerald's method becomes explicit. He calls it the three creations. The first is the preconception: a visualization of the film, sometimes down to scenes, before anyone shoots. On location, reality is always something else, and clinging to the original picture would make a bad movie. The second creation is the constant re-envisioning in the field. Then the drives come home. Two people have been shooting; he has not seen his DP's footage, and there are no feature-style rushes. After a hard project he takes about a month away to heal and get fresh eyes, then he re-engages fully. He watches every frame, logging *Hunger Ward* on a spreadsheet some 1,500 lines long. That month of notes produces an outline: the third vision, usually quite different from the first. Stay closed to that process and you try to build a film you do not actually have.

Fridman hears a scientific method in it: a hypothesis, a test in the world, then an honest reading of the data after the phenomenon is gone. Fitzgerald accepts the analogy. The cut itself is incremental, with a breakthrough that finally shows how the pieces fit, and you have to be patient enough to wait for it. Self-criticism and optimism, he says, are dance partners, not opposites. Advice to young filmmakers starts with craft, which is more than knowing which button records. He never went to film school. He talked his way into a television directing class in graduate school because he needed an extra credit, fell in love, and taught himself microphones and lenses on local commercials. After the MFA he lived out of a car trunk for a couple of years, then shot daily for three and a half months across nine countries on Semester at Sea. For small human-rights documentaries, two or three people is the right size: you work yourself to the bone, and you keep the intimacy that access requires. A Woman Captured, one of his favorite films, was made by a single filmmaker with one camera and one lens. It can be done. It is not how he works best. A second camera doubles the footage on a three-day rescue, and it frees the director to build relationships instead of only acquiring images.

Pressed for favorite documentaries, Fitzgerald jokes about *March of the Penguins* and then gets serious. His top films lean Eastern European: Viktor Kossakovsky's *Aquarela*, a meditation on water; *A Woman Captured*, shot in Hungary, in which a filmmaker comes to understand that her subject has been held as a domestic slave for ten years and helps her escape; and *Immortal* (2019), by a Russian woman, about the state shaping people into vehicles for itself. He adds Frederick Wiseman's *Titicut Follies*, filmed inside a mental institution, because Wiseman is the godfather of direct cinema. Early in his career Fitzgerald believed the vérité filmmaker should only observe, never intervene. That was the foundation for years. Then he made *Lifeboat*.

In 2016, after the Greece–Turkey border closed, Syrian asylum seekers were pushed west across the Mediterranean from Libya. Nation-states were not patrolling those waters. A small NGO, Sea-Watch, cobbled together volunteers, bought a research vessel, retrofitted it, and went to pull people out. Fitzgerald found that inspiring: civilians doing what leaders would not. In the first three days they came upon more than 3,000 people in flimsy rafts. Within hours, people were being pushed, jumping, or falling into the water, and some could not swim. The choice was to film someone drowning or to put the cameras in the bottom of the Zodiac and pull them out. They pulled. A Wiseman disciple would have kept rolling. Fitzgerald had not anticipated the dilemma, felt no doubt, and does not regret it. However the film might have been different, he can sleep. In moments like that he is a human being first and a filmmaker second.

He resists putting himself at the center. He hates what he calls "belly-button docs," navel-gazing films about the filmmaker's own place in the world. He is not the point; what is unfolding, and what needs action, is. The small concession to Fridman's love of a broken fourth wall is an occasional question left on the soundtrack, just enough to remind viewers that a person is behind the camera. On the Sea-Watch boat — 30 meters, a crew of 15, two of them the film team — they had agreed to do whatever the rescue required. His DP, Kenny Allen, has arms like tree trunks. The head of mission put him on the Zodiac because he could haul a person out with one arm. After about 24 hours of triage, Fitzgerald saw Kenny on deck helping people up the ladders. The camera was nowhere. He grabbed Kenny's shoulders: we are here to do what you are doing, and we are also here to film it. Kenny did not know where the camera was. He went and found it. Forget the camera when a life is in the water. Remember it, because the record is a form of help too.

Werner Herzog, Fridman has read, teaches young filmmakers to pick locks. Fitzgerald's test is whether a rule is just and why it exists. Arriving in southern Yemen with gear, even with permissions, means hours of negotiation and bribes if you walk the ordinary line. Colleagues had already learned that. He hires a fixer in advance, uses a different line, and nobody looks at the cases. In a conflict zone he also refuses armed security. In Yemen, guns on your detail make you a target; operating under international humanitarian law, he says, actually offers more protection. In the north, de facto authorities are with you anyway. Fear he will not costume as heroism. It is an alarm that keeps you alive. You let it live, and you act anyway. Fridman suggests that for this kind of filmmaker, fear is often a signal you *should* do the story. Fitzgerald agrees. There is no guarantee of physical safety. That may be why the work is worth doing.

*50 Feet from Syria* was made early in the uprising, back at the Syrian–Turkish border with that volunteer surgeon, in what was then the only Turkish-government-sanctioned clinic treating Syrian refugees. They filmed operations on war wounded and crossed into camps on the Syrian side. The civilian cost of the war was still poorly understood in the West. The film's quiet hero is a local Turkish businessman Fitzgerald thinks of as a Turkish Schindler. No one paid him. He saw the medical need a few kilometers away and the three layers of security — Turkish guards, the no-man's-land, Syrian guards at the camp — that kept the desperate from reaching a clinic just across the line.

He built the corridor himself. Every day he drove out with food, talked with each layer of guards, and became trustworthy in their eyes. Gates opened. He loaded the worst cases from across northern Syria into his car, took them to the hospital, and, if they wanted, drove them home after they healed. He spent his own money because he saw people in need. That, for Fitzgerald, is heroism: selfless, aspirational, a use of time on the planet that is actually worth something. Fridman notes that Schindler in the film was a flawed man, not the type who does this, until war forced a basic humanity through. Fitzgerald takes the point. The whims of war ask things of you that you did not know would be asked. How you answer is who you are.

Fridman, a YouTube partisan, is exasperated that films this important are so hard to find even if you will pay anything. *Lifeboat* streams free on *The New Yorker*'s site. *Hunger Ward* is on Paramount+ and on Pluto TV with ads. You still have to know to chase them. Fitzgerald's economic answer is uncomfortable: maybe this is not what a mass audience wants, next to reality television and animal-rescue shows, which is exactly why he thinks the work remains vital. Fridman pushes back. People binge five-hour podcasts. Paywalls and extra clicks are not only about money; they are friction, and friction sends you back to TikTok. The films that could change something are the ones that most need a machine as open as YouTube.

Write the trillion-dollar check, Fitzgerald says, and the films go on YouTube, because then he would not have to sell them to fund the next one. Film is an art and an industry, and that tension never resolves. Before *Hunger Ward*, which had funders, he put *Lifeboat* and *50 Feet from Syria* on a credit card. A bunk and free food on a rescue boat is still broke. He does it believing that if he brings his full "quiver of creative arrows," he can make something of value that someone will buy. Every time he has taken that flyer, he has gotten back into the black. It requires a financial risk threshold. He has it because he believes in the stories.

Asked what he would tell high-school and college students who want a life they can be proud of, he does not start with Oscars he has not won. Put down the smartphone. Step away from the monitor. Real life is not a screen. The skills that matter sit under the technical ones schools teach: how to interact, listen, see, and observe. If the electricity dies five miles from home, you should still be able to walk back on visual landmarks you set for yourself. If the satellites stop, too many people become useless. Learn to write well. Read a lot. The knowledge that comes off a page is a different kind of wisdom. Theater trained him for documentary work because both are listening. He is an introvert, afraid of people and drawn to them, which is not a contradiction he wants resolved.

Books that stayed with him are mostly nonfiction. A high-school English teacher gave him Kahlil Gibran's *The Prophet* at graduation; it still has a special place on the shelf, because it speaks to the nature of human experience and he returns to it for wisdom. He loves *Ten Points*, a memoir by Bill Strickland, once editor of *Bicycle* magazine, about growing up with abuse and becoming someone else. In his early twenties he hit Stephen Covey's *The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People* and kept, among other things, "seek first to understand, then to be understood," and the habit of proactivity. *The Princess Bride* is the fiction outlier.

The darkest personal moment he offers is also from those early twenties, in Southern California. Riding the concrete path along the Pacific Coast Highway, he heard a crash before he saw it. A Volvo had hit another car, gone over the top, and struck a Volkswagen van, peeling the roof off. In the road: a decapitated body, another person still alive, and on the Volvo's hood a woman who had come through the windshield, blood everywhere, moaning. A bystander ran to the person in the road and started first aid. Every fiber in Fitzgerald wanted to go to the woman on the hood. It was obvious she would die; he thought he could at least offer comfort. Then the sirens started. Paramedics would be there in minutes. He froze, afraid, and did nothing. He watched her die on the hood of the Volvo.

That failure is seared in. He was not able to act in a moment of need, however small the act might have been. Out of it he made a decision: if he ever again had the ability to help someone in such need, he would act. Fear would not freeze him. It would catalyze him, even if he lacked the skill set. In some ways the documentaries are that vow continued. He does not want to be the person who only watches.

What is the meaning of life? Fitzgerald will only answer for himself. He believes the meaning of his life is to try to make the world a little better before he goes. In graduate school he directed C.S. Lewis's play *Shadowlands*, and a line stayed with him for years: we are like blocks of stone out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men; the blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much, are what make us perfect. He would drop the word "perfect." He keeps the rest. The blows are the experiences we go through. They shape us, necessarily, and he hopes they shape him into someone who can make the world a little better before it is over.

He thinks about the going part. He has no death wish and tries to cut risk, but he lives every day with the knowledge that life is fleeting and that he will go into the ground, or become ashes, like everyone else. He does not let that knowledge stop him. It drives him to get as much done as he can before he goes. Fridman offers the image of mortality as a dance partner you try to dance with beautifully. At the close he quotes Elie Wiesel: the opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference; the opposite of art is not ugliness, it is indifference; the opposite of faith is not heresy, it is indifference; and the opposite of life is not death, it is indifference.