Vanya_Kewley
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.