Vanya Sarah Kewley (8 November 1937 – 17 July 2012) was an Anglo-French journalist, documentary maker and nurse noted for her 1988 documentary film Tibet: A Case to Answer about the human rights situation in Tibet under Chinese rule. Born in Calcutta to a French mother and a British father, she moved to London to train as a nurse but did not have much enthusiasm about her career and began working as a researcher for Granada Television in 1965. Kewley had her first foreign assignment in 1969 and continued to be sent abroad for assignments and interviewed major world figures of the period. She moved to working on the ITV current affairs series This Week in 1972 and made several documentaries for the programme.
Kewley won her first award for a documentary about the South Korean human rights situations in 1977. She began planning Tibet: A Case to Answer in 1985 and the project was approved by Channel 4's commissioning editor David Lloyd. Kewley entered the country via a tourist group and initially shared amateur filming equipment with the cinematographer Sean Bobbitt before he became ill. She returned to Tibet three years later to film a follow-up but stopped film making after being diagnosed with parkinson's disease in 1993. Kewley however returned to nursing and worked for the Red Cross in Bosnia and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Biography
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 Coleman Kewley 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, Scene at 6.30. 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 also filmed Khaled Mosharraf and other Bangladeshi freedom fighters in East Pakistan in 1971.
Kewley 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 she contracted infective hepatitis and liver abscesses while filming in the country's jungle war areas and evaded fire from Vietcong forces. Kewley also made programmes about the 1972 Norwegian European Communities membership referendum and a fourteen-year-old boy imprisoned in Turkey on drug charges. That same year she became engaged to the journalist Richard Lindley but the marriage was later called off. Kewley interviewed the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet the 14th Dalai Lama at his home in the Himalayas for the 1975 film The Lama King and this formed a lifelong friendship. She 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.