Wide Angle: Interview with filmmaker Oliver Stoltz
This is an interview I conducted with Oliver Stoltz about the making of his film, Lord’s Children.
Listen to the original audio interview at WIDE ANGLE.
OLIVER STOLTZ:
My name is Oliver Stoltz. I’m a German filmmaker and producer, writer, and director of Lord’s Children, together with my partner, Ali Samadi Ahadi.
WIDE ANGLE:
Can you talk about how you came to this film, and what interested you about it?
OLIVER STOLTZ:
When I lived in Los Angeles, I stumbled on the internet over a study of the U.N. about the fate of children in Northern Uganda. And it was interviews of children who have been abducted and had been forced to kill, and I never heard about his before. I was looking for more information, and was going after this whole situation in northern Uganda, trying to understand it. My idea was a fiction project, a feature film, but then the next coincidence came when I met my directing partner Ali Samadi Ahadi. And we found out that he too as a child was involved in war. We both were very early on in conflict zones, me in Namibia, southwest Africa before independence, when there was also a rebel war going on. And my partner was forced into the Iranian army during the first Iran-Iraq war, and had to flee Iran in order not to be killed in a minefield. They used children at that time to clear minefields.
What happens if you’ve been made into a murderer, and you’ve been made to do something, which is hard to realize even for a grownup. As a child, how do you live after this? How do you cope with what you’ve been through? And we started investigating about trauma theory, met people and investigated different conflicts that involved child soldiers.
WIDE ANGLE:
How did you gain access to these camps?
OLIVER STOLTZ:
We got access to the rehabilitation camps in northern Uganda through the Catholic Church in northern Uganda. They helped us because they were running through the organization Caritas, they were running a camp right in the epicenter of the war, which was created out of children who returned and said, ‘here we are and that’s where we want to be treated’. And so the Church started to build a center around these children. We went where other people feared to go and that’s how we got access.
WIDE ANGLE:
So, what were the obstacles of filming in a war zone? Was the camp ever attacked?
OLIVER STOLTZ:
The camp was attacked almost every two, three months. The obstacles were on one side the rebel attacks in the whole area that traveled to the war zone. There were on a daily basis attacks on the street. On the other side, it was the government that prevented journalists, people they couldn’t control, from going into areas where they couldn’t control them. So that’s why we decided to shoot without shooting permission and with small equipment. The biggest fear we had was traveling into, going to the rehabilitation center in Pajule, and making those moves to other places. It looks like, in the film, this is just an easy drive but this was like playing lotto with our lives. Because there were attacks on the street everyday.
WIDE ANGLE:
How long did you follow these children?
OLIVER STOLTZ:
We followed them over a course of six to eight months. We traveled four times to see their development.
WIDE ANGLE:
Can these children be rehabilitated and reintegrated?
OLIVER STOLTZ:
Oh, absolutely. I’ve seen it myself. There is something in us human beings, no matter how awful life has been treating you, especially in children, and you can never destroy hope. All these children — they’ve been raped, they’ve been forced to kill, they’ve witnessed killings. All of us grown ups would break and would be traumatized for life. But those children, they have different ways of coping with it. But what kept them going was hope for a better life. And you can work with this hope, and this is what those social workers do. All you need to give them is opportunities, instead of stigmatizing them and keeping them separate, you have to get them back into society, give them an education. That’s the main thing everyone wants. To be some way of supporting themselves and making a living. They’re still outsiders, and the only thing those children have learned for a long time is killing, so you need to give them other tools.
WIDE ANGLE:
We’ve spoken to a few psychologists who have said the community that they return to and the way that they are accepted are so vital to their reintegration and rehabilitation. Did you find that?
OLIVER STOLTZ:
Yeah. It is. The boy that best coped with the whole thing was Francis. Because he had a very loving family that really took care of him. He now has a scholarship. He’s really on his way to maybe even go to university. Kilama, the other boy, the family wasn’t there. No one is really being a guide for him. I try to do what I could from Germany on the phone, but you can’t be a parent on a long distance phone line. I think your trauma therapists are right. It’s love, acceptance and coming back to a society that is not stigmatizing you and having an opportunity in life.
WIDE ANGLE:
What is one moment or one experience that stays with you from making the film?
OLIVER STOLTZ:
The place where we stayed in the rehabilitation center was a few weeks before we came it was attacked by rebels. And Francis was one of those rebels who attacked the place where he fled to later on. So he described to me how he was going after the priest, the same priest that was there who was our host in this place. And how he was trying to find cookies, and where he was looking, and it’s the same kind of place where every night we shut iron doors and hope that no one was attacking us.
WIDE ANGLE:
OK, well one last question, this film was shot in 2003 and 2004. Have you followed up with these children in the last four or five years?
OLIVER STOLTZ:
We paid for their education after we finished filming until they are on their own legs. So Kilama went to high school for two years, he dropped out. He started his own business. He has a wife now, he is like selling soap and beer and small things and we gave him starting money for that. Francis is still going to school. Jennifer got into sewing school and then we bought her a sewing machine. Everything fell into a fire so we gave her more money to start up again. She’s still together with her husband. She got a little boy, she named him Ali after my partner.
WIDE ANGLE:
Thank you, Oliver.
OLIVER STOLTZ:
Thank you very much.
Wide Angle: Public Health Experts on Maternal Death
EXPERT INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT: LYNN FREEDMAN AND HELEN de PINHO
WIDE ANGLE sat down with Lynn Freedman and Helen de Pinho from Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. They work with developing countries and international agencies to improve availability and quality of emergency obstetric care for women in childbirth.
Here is the transcript of our discussion on the causes of maternal death, the importance of maternal health and the progress that is being made in Mozambique and around the world now that this issue is on the international development agenda.
Lynn Freedman is a human rights attorney and the Director of AMDD, Averting Maternal Death and Disability. Helen de Pinho is a physician from South Africa who works with AMDD. She recently traveled to Mozambique to meet with mid-level medical providers there.
LYNN FREEDMAN: Women everywhere in the world who die in childbirth die from basically the same set of causes. Mostly direct obstetric causes—things like bleeding, or hemorrhaging, infection, obstructed labor. We know the medical interventions that will save a woman’s life if she has one of those complications. The big, big issue is getting those medical interventions to the women who need them, and so that’s where the big challenge comes in—ensuring that women in remote rural areas, women who perhaps don’t have the money to get to a facility much less get into the facility, pay for the services. To make sure women in
that position get access to life-saving care.
There’s no question that the current number of surgeons and surgical technicians in Mozambique cannot meet the enormous need for emergency obstetric care.
HELEN DE PINHO: There are 26 obstetricians in Mozambique. Fourteen of them are in the central hospital in Maputo, and I think only about three or four or five are actually out in the rural area, so that gives you an idea of distribution and numbers. And a similar kind of distribution pattern for surgeons in Mozambique. The role of the non-physician clinician has always been there in many of these countries; that’s not new. The surgical midwife, yes, that is new. And that will change, but what that would do is strengthen what’s already
happening. It doesn’t shift…it doesn’t displace doctors in any way, because they’re just simply not there.
WIDE ANGLE: Lynn, you mentioned that there’s this new energy about addressing maternal mortality. Can you speak about this new energy, where it’s come from, and why now?
LYNN FREEDMAN: Well, I think maternal mortality has…has certainly risen to the top of the development agenda, helped enormously by the fact that it is one of the Millennium Development Goals.
The Millennium Development Goals are a set of eight goals that the U.N. general assembly passed at the turn of the millennium in the year 2000 to guide poverty reduction efforts in the world in the coming millennium, or at least the coming 15 years.
But they also include three health goals. One is HIV, TB and Malaria. Another is to reduce child mortality. And MDG 5 is to improve maternal health with two goals: one is to reduce maternal mortality by
75% and the second target under improved maternal health is to have universal access to reproductive health services.
So that has put maternal mortality itself on the health and development agenda.
HELEN DE PINHO: …if I can just talk to what’s happening in Mozambique at that. What we see is first of all very high-level commitment to reducing maternal mortality. And then also to—recognizing the sort of continuum of care, from when the woman first becomes pregnant or even before she comes pregnant, to make sure that –that young girls are adequately fed, that—that they are nutritionally well—well-nourished. That there is family planning accessible. The policies are good, they’re there. And now it’s a matter of actually getting them implemented in all the areas.
WIDE ANGLE: How will that later affect the health of the entire system?
LYNN FREEDMAN: Well, there’s no question that a huge proportion of newborn deaths are actually attributable to the things that happen during pregnancy and delivery. We certainly want to make sure we pay
attention to and care about the woman herself and her survival. But, we also acknowledge that the survival and life of a newborn is very closely linked to what happens to the mother and indeed, the life, well-being and survival of the rest of her family, not just the baby she’s giving birth to right then. The ramifications of maternal death or maternal survival go well beyond just her children. It’s her family, it’s her community, it’s productive work for the country, and it’s her own right to be a participating member for society.
WIDE ANGLE: Thank you Lynn, and thank you, Helen.
LYNN FREEDMAN: Our pleasure.
HELEN DE PINHO: It is a pleasure, thank you.
Wide Angle: American Midwives ‘Catch Babies’ in Hospitals
WIDE ANGLE explores the often misunderstood role of midwives in the U.S. We learn about who they are, what they do and where they practice. While midwives attend births in most of the world, physician-attended births are the norm in the U.S.
I produced this video with Lauren Feeney: American Midwives ‘Catch Babies’ in Hospitals.
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