BBC Screening: Starving Yemen + Q&A

BBC Arabic and BBC Our World present Starving Yemen.

This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Nawal al-Maghafi and others.

Since March 2015, a coalition of the Middle East’s richest countries, led by Saudi Arabia, and armed by the UK and US has been bombing the region’s poorest state, Yemen.

While the bombing campaign has been receiving intermittent coverage in the international media, the enormous scale of the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Yemen as a result continues to be overlooked.

Today, more than twenty million Yemenis are relying on aid to survive. The coalition’s blockade of the country has previously cut off the food and aid imports on which the population depends, and while trade has now resumed they maintain complete control over all imports and exports to and from Yemen.

We meet Shuaib, he was rushed in to hospital suffering from fever and diarrhoea. Hodeida’s main hospital is already struggling to cope, working under airstrikes, electricity cuts and lack of supplies. Shuaib’s antibiotic is completely out of stock, and doctors do the best they can to save him with the little supplies that they have.

Through the eyes of Ashwaq Muharram, a medical doctor living and practicing in Hodeida, viewers will see the silent killer of this ongoing conflict: the blockade currently imposed by the Saudi-led coalition and the widespread bombing of infrastructure which is drastically disrupting civilians’ access to aid.

This critical film provides an insight into what is happening in Yemen beyond the bombs and the bullets. It will introduce the audience to Yemenis whose coping strategies have collapsed, and who are in desperate need of the world’s attention as a humanitarian catastrophe unfolds in their land.

Directed and Reported by: Nawal Al-Maghafi
Edit Producer: Karolina Mottram
Edited by: Shayma Alissi
Filmed by: Mohammed Al-Mikhlafi
Runtime: 25′

Speakers:

Kavita Puri – Editor, BBC Our World

Nawal Al-Maghafi – BBC Reporter

Andre Heller Perache – head of the Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) programmes unit and former head of mission in Yemen

Peter Oborne – Associate editor of The Spectator and chief political commentator at The Daily Telegraph