Transcript:

00:00 Hello, this is Melissa Hale-Spencer, the editor of The Enterprise and today we're talking to Lindsey Parietti in London and she grew up in Altamont and has just won an award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts for a fascinating documentary on chimpanzees used for drug experiments that were later abandoned on an island in Africa. So Lindsey, congratulations and tell us, how did you find this story? How, how did you discover this?

00:45 Um, I actually heard about the story offhand at our conservation talk that I went to an England at a zoo. Um, it wasn't the subject of the talk and, but someone just mentioned blood chimps and Liberia and my ears perked up instantly being a journalist and I started looking into it more because I had to make a film as part of my master's program in wildlife filmmaking, which is why I moved to England. Um, and as soon as I started digging a little bit deeper into the story, it was just so fascinating and also really incredible how long the research lasted and that the problem was still ongoing when I took the story on, which is part of the reason that attracted me to it because the chimpanzees were still out on the islands alive.

01:26 And so how did you go about, just to kind of recap the film? Um, there are two main onscreen characters with interviews interspersed. One is Joseph Thomas who was a lab technician trained to shoot darts to tranquilize them and now has come to care for them and love them. And Jenny Desmond, who is, I assume an activist as well as a, a animal rights, um, the humane society person. How did you set up these interviews and, and come to travel to Africa to do it. How long did that whole process take?

02:09 I'm planning the film took about three months or two months before I went. I think about three months from when I first got in contact with Jenny through a group of animal rights activists and she and her husband who's a wildlife vet, um, were actually sent there by the humane society to put an emergency plan in place for the care of the chimpanzees when the organization that was testing that left them to starve out on these islands. That's sort of how it all took off.

02:37 And then when you took the film yourself, I'm assuming you're the actual film running the camera and filmed, edited, produced, directed, and is that, that sounds like. Oh my gosh. And it sounds like it's your voice doing the narration as well. Both of my voice. Yes. Have a one

03:00 woman operation that's really impressive. So, um, tell us, let's just back up and kind of walk through your life to see how you got to where you are. You grew up in Altima, is that right? Yes. I grew up in Altamont and then I went to university and Boston University and studied journalism and political science. So what attracted you, what attracted you to journalism? Why, why journalism? Um, I think I wasn't, I wasn't able to like choose just one career, basically I was interested in so many things and I liked the idea that journalism, you could be doing something completely different from one day to the next and also you get this incredible access into people's lives and stories and you get to explore what they're doing and um, look at different professions if you want to. So I thought that was really exciting to have that constant variety and never really have to choose what I wanted to do when I grew up.

03:55 But you did choose and you choose something that kind of encompasses the world. So what happened after you got your degree? Where, where did you go immediately after? Um, I was working as a political correspondent in Boston for a regional newspaper and then I just saw the newspaper industry sort of bleeding jobs and a lot of my friends getting laid off. And I thought that if I learned Arabic it would make me a bit more marketable and that industry, if I wanted to come back to the states. So I moved to Egypt. I took a job there working for a group of magazines and I intended to say just a year or two, but then the Egyptian revolution happened. It was really an exciting time to be there as a journalist. Um, and I ended up saying eight years until I moved to England to do the master's in wildlife filmmaking.

04:42 Well, I certainly want to hear about the English chapter of your life, but let's just explore a bit about these eight years you spent in Egypt. Yeah. You were right at the center of a huge revolution. How, what, who, who did you correspond for what, what was your.

05:04 Yeah, I was working a bit for royders. I did a bit of freelance work for the Associated Press. Um, I always tried to maintain, you know, one sort of study job for a local news organization to kind of make contacts and, you know, have a support system on the ground that way and then do a bit of freelancing for publications and news organizations based in the states or abroad.

05:26 And how was it difficult being an American, being a woman, being um, did, did you find, what were the challenges in doing that job?

05:38 Um, well, just the challenges in terms of daily life. Yeah, it was difficult being a woman there. There's a lot of sexual harassment, which is a huge problem. I mean not just for foreigners, for any women there. So you have to adapt to that and that obviously gets in the way sometimes of, of doing your job, but being a woman can also be an asset because it's a very sort of gender segregated society and a lot of ways. So you can get access to women's stories for example, that you might not be able to as a man.

06:09 Um, do you have particular stories there that maybe ones that you found because you were a woman? Is particular stories there that you're proud of or that stand out in your mind during those eight years?

06:22 I did a little bit of reporting on some refugee issues. A lot of African migrants end up coming through Cairo trying to get asylum somewhere else. And I think I was proud that I covered that during the revolution because I was trying to find stories that were a little bit off the beaten track or things that weren't being paid attention to while all the chaos was happening. Um, and then in terms of other women's stories, just, um, a lot of things about women business owners and entrepreneurs and things like that and different areas in different income brackets in Cairo. Just getting access to people's houses and lives and stuff. Like it's easier to do in some way as if you're a woman, I guess.

07:02 Fascinating. And I understand you also cofounded an online news site while you were there. Can you tell us about that?

07:10 Um, yeah. The news site is called [inaudible] acid and it was a website that I started, like you said, with a group of journalists that I was working with. Um, when we sort of got pushed out of the English language version of an Arabic newspaper we were working for because they thought we were reporting to freely basically. And they just sort of wanted us to tow the business line and not do any independent reporting. Um, but yeah, that was also crazy starting a news website in the middle of a revolution in Cairo with all that was going on politically and actually now the government has blocked the news website so you can only access it from outside of Egypt, but you can't, people can't see it inside of the country anymore.

07:51 Oh Gosh. What is shame? So was the motivation there that it could be more immediate rather than going through the whole print process that you could post things quickly or was it that it would be more accessible to readers? What was the question?

08:08 The motivation there was that it would be more independent. The government censors focused more on print and TV media and they at that time weren't paying as much attention to online spaces that weren't printing newspapers. So it was just a way for us to start something as a journalist collective, you know, funded by grants and, and our own funding so that no one could tell us, you know, we couldn't write something that we wanted to say.

08:34 Admirable. Well, what would make you pull up stakes and moved to England when you had really established, learned a language, established expertise, I'm assuming lots of contacts and friends and relationships and why? Why did you move to whole different part of the world?

08:57 I think mostly because it just became so difficult to do my job there in terms of the government cracking down on journalists and it at some point it felt even more dangerous than it did during the immediate street protests or the revolution. Because during the protests, you know, you know what areas of the city they're happening. You can go in and navigate it and the danger is, is very much a physical one. But when you have the government rounding up journalists and shutting down news websites and going to people's houses to find them and putting journalists on bogus trials like the Algebra zero journalists who ended up in jail for about a year, um, yeah, that just, it just became all a bit much and it seemed impossible to be able to report with any kind of freedom from Egypt anymore. Right.

09:42 I thought it was time for a change and what a change it was because you went from, you know, basically political issues too. It seems, at least judging by this one field that I've seen environmental issues. So tell us about both the geographic switch as well as the, you know, mental switch. Yeah. Well,

10:05 um, I was already starting to cover environmental issues a little bit in Egypt when I couldn't report as much on politics anymore. Um, so that was sort of a natural transition, although as you know, as you can probably see from the film, environmental issues end up being quite political anyway. So I don't know that I've totally managed to escape it. Um, but I still just want to tell social justice stories that have an impact in some way and I think in that vein, it's kind of similar to what I've always wanted to do. Um, I guess I just got tired of I'm covering people killing people. So I wanted to cover people killing animals instead.

10:45 Goodness, well, you're able to have humor in the midst of it. Good for you. So tell us, you, you're in a master's program, you said how much longer is that and what else does it entail?

10:54 Um, I finished that last year actually. So that's what I produced the film four and I'm now I'm working here for the BBC natural history unit, making a TV series related to my final film. Not the same chimpanzees but similar characters and same part of the world.

11:11 And what is the series about more specific? So this series is

11:16 about, um, Jenny, who's one of the characters in my film and her husband, Jimmy, who are rescuing a bunch of orphan baby chimpanzees who basically had been taken away from their family is from either a poaching or the pet trade. Um, and have ended up with no one to take care of them and they suddenly have found themselves with 26 baby chimpanzees in the past couple of years, you know, never intending to start a sanctuary in Liberia.

11:42 Oh my goodness. Well, yeah, that's crazy. So, um, do you have like project a pathway for your life or is, is your life as something that unfolds as it happens?

11:58 Um, I think probably a little bit more of the latter. I think Egypt trained out of me planning every minute of my life because it's almost impossible to which I guess ultimately it was a good thing. I mean I have ideas of things that I want to do, but I don't have a five year plan or anything like that.

12:15 So what are some of these ideas? I can't wait to hear

12:19 [inaudible], we'll just thought I want to keep telling stories, you know, like blood island that I want to find environmental and animal and political stories that deserve attention, but maybe people haven't heard about and hopefully just find the entertaining ways to bring them to people so that they'll have some sort of presidents or impact.

12:39 Well, I wonder too, I'm in, you would probably have given us a lot more thought than most people with journalism in the shifting state it's in now. Do you make a distinction between journalism and advocacy? In other words, in, at the end of your film, you know, comes up in type saying that the New York blood center, which is just so our listeners know, the entity that conducted these experiments from the 19 seventies until they left apparently during the Ebola crisis, um, that they did not respond to interview requests, but had they responded with the film be different? Would it have, you know, maybe showed people dying of hepatitis before there was a vaccine or something like that? Or is there seems to be a place in modern journalism for, um, you know, something that's more towards advocacy than this idea that there's a balance?

13:43 Yeah, I think, um, well, so those are sort of two questions I guess, but I have thought a lot about it, especially having been in Egypt and being trained as a journalist in the states at the time that I was, um, it was, you know, stressed very emphatically that you always have to be neutral and you have to give both sides an opportunity to speak and you can't be seen to be taking a position because that can compromise your professional reputation. Um, but then being in Egypt, I think people look at, you know, journalists, they're looking at it much differently and it's not surprising given how many human rights violations the government is perpetrating on its own people, it becomes really almost ridiculous to be neutral and to strive that hard to, to cover both sides of the story equally when you know that something's so wrong is happening I guess.

14:33 Um, but in terms of this story in specific, uh, I definitely wanted to speak to the New York blood center and hear what they had to say and also to fill in some of the gaps and, you know, what happened through this whole three decades of research and had they responded, I guess it would have depended what at what point in production they responded. If I was still filming the film, I would have been happy to go interview them and include their perspective. Um, and had it come after when I also gave them a chance to respond, um, I could have put some kind of statement in the end, but, uh, they've, they've chosen to go, you know, silent on that issue and not do any media since the whole upper I started.

15:15 Yeah, I mean it's a difficult line even in this small town paper on enterprise because there are certain things like with climate change, you don't want to give equal, you know, equal space or wait to someone that's denying it at this point because there's such a thing as truth. But, um, it, I guess if you've been in the middle of a revolution, you would have that even even more in the front of your brain in the way you work because of course the roots of American journalism, we're very, very much advocacy journalism and there's a truth to be told that it doesn't balance out with another side sometimes. But what happens is you go forward in your career, for instance, with this series on the Desmond's, um, is there like a, a way to look if you're looking just at the issue of chimpanzees that were used for experimentation, is there a sense that it would have been more humane to have killed them at the end of the experiments? Or is it better just not to use them at all? Or can you explore that as a journalist

16:28 now? We don't use chimpanzees anymore in medical research. I mean all of Europe and the states have, have stopped doing that, although they haven't yet put, um, all of the chimpanzees into sanctuary. Is that used to be used in lab testing in the US? Um, I guess it's easy to sit in the position that we're in now and, and knowing what we do and having the laws that we do and safe of self and they know if they're in a cage, they're going to be in the cage tomorrow and the next day, um, which is, you know, part of the reason why all of these countries have banned testing on primates minutes. Yeah. But I think I'm going back, just want to touch back on your earlier point. I think there's a difference between fair and neutral. I think you can be fair as a journalist and give people the space to say what they think and, and present a sort of balance argument without giving equal weight to every single side of the story. Like the climate change example is a perfect one. I mean if we truly balanced that, we'd have 97 quotes supporting climate change to the three, you know, that don't believe in it. And yet no article is reported like that. So it's, I mean they're, there reaches a point when we know which side of history is the right one. And, and it's a bit ridiculous to make things completely 50 slash 50.

17:46 Oh, I agree. And truth is kind of an evolving thing. Our whole view of human beings as animals has changed dramatically since my child interviewed a vet reason. We use it. Yeah. The animals I treated used to be out in the barn, then they came into the house, now they're in the bedroom. So we're kind of evolving as a species in our interview, have you know who these creatures are that we share the planet with. But I'm, one of the things I just loved about your film was the way I'm. Joseph Thomas talked about his, um, his job and how he felt this responsibility for these creatures and paid out of his own pocket. And you've got that wonderful scene where he's kind of fondling and caressing one of the chimps and, and you can just see their interaction and so much of, um, print journalism, you know, you don't get to have a sense of who the people really are. And I just, I just thought that was, it was just wonderful how you could make him feel relaxed enough that he'd act that way in front of you with camera when you had probably arrived on the scene as a stranger. What, like, what techniques do you use to kind of put people at ease and get them to, you know, come out of themselves and be natural in front of a camera like that?

19:16 Yeah. Well Joseph was a complete star. I think he would. Maybe he's just like that anyway. I guess some people it's easier for them than others. Um, but at that point I had only spent two days with Joseph, so I didn't have a super long time to get to know him. Um, I dunno. I guess that's just giving. I sort of think of journalism almost like therapy kind of the way that you sit there and you'd give people an opportunity to just tell their story and, and let them know that you care about hearing what they have to say. And I think it's in the presence of the way that you do that in the way you, you know, respect what the they're giving to you and that they're giving you this window into their lives. Um, but it's not always as easy as it was with Joseph. Of course. Some people are really self conscious in front of the camera, I think. I think I probably am. I'd much prefer to be behind it. Well, another thing too, as you were

20:08 scribing, you're kind of thirst for knowledge and curiosity that you didn't want to decide what you wanted to be when you grew up. You are kind of doing it all. I'm just wondering what in you as a person may be in your upbringing, maybe from particular teachers. How did you get to be someone who can kind of bounce around the world and still connect with people well enough to tell their stories in a meaningful way? I mean, what, where does that come from? Well,

20:38 um, well I'm not sure if I can answer that. I don't know. You might have to ask my mom. Um, I guess I don't, those two things for me are sort of go hand in hand. I think the traveling has definitely helped me connect with people more just because I've been exposed to different situations and different cultures and different people and I'm also had this experience of being in the minority in Egypt and being surrounded by people who didn't necessarily think like me or weren't necessarily raised like me. So I think that's a really, um, sort of eyeopening experience when you, when you think like, wow, not everyone around me is thinking like I am. And in fact they're often thinking the opposite. It's sort of, it just opens your eyes to I guess I'm being more empathetic when, when you're listening to different perspectives.

21:28 Yeah. Well it's quite a gift and you've done wonderful things with it. Our time is going rapidly. Are there any important things that I haven't asked you or you think people should know either about you or your work?

21:42 Oh, well I'd love it if people know that they can actually see the short film online and it's only 12 minutes so I won't take up too much of their time, but you can find it on, on Youtube or through the facebook page for the film, which is blood island film.

21:57 And was blood island named that before they put the chimpanzees there?

22:02 No, it's actually called monkey island, but that's just the. I didn't think that sounded as good as. I think that's great. It's very dramatic. Just thinking of the right name. So that was your year, Monica. Oh, that's, yeah. And also chimpanzees, monkeys or apes. So it's a bit of a misnomer for the island.

22:18 I see. I see. So, um, blood island, did that phrase come to you in a particular context or is that just, how did that, how did you come up with that?

22:31 Yeah, I'm not sure exactly how I thought of it, but it just because of the blood research they were being used to find blood vaccines for hepatitis and other diseases and then you know, the fact that they're on these islands and I wanted something quite short and punchy and I guess that's how it came to me.

22:48 Yeah, well I'm just such a hardcore print journalist. I was amazed at the things you did. Like when you were talking about one particular chimpanzee, Samantha, I think her name was, and the number of times she had been tranquilized and the number of times that she had had various procedures done and you show Jenny's hands, kind of like what do you call them and fingers walk across those old style sort of loud record. Yeah, the bulk of it. So I mean do you like write out kind of a stage script for yourself? Like okay, I'm going to do the record so I'm going to show hands going across a large amount of files or are those things that just kind of happen as you're filming in? You put it all together later? Well, you need to

23:41 no, the grammar of film a little bit and know what kind of shots you need, order to cut it all together to make it at work properly. So, you know, like, yeah, I need a closeup of the hands that I needed her pulling a file out and all the, all of that stuff. But some of it you don't know what's going to happen, which is what I think is cool about documentary and observational films and you're just following it along. Like when Joseph says, when I asked him if the chimpanzees think of him him differently now, um, I didn't know what he was going to say to that and I really liked his response because he said no, they think of me the same and I knew that I really wanted to include that because I didn't want to make it seem like this rosy story as in, you know, Joseph, of course has an amazing story and he did something great trying to save the chimps lives, but he also helped oversee three decades of really invasive and horrible procedures that they went through. So it's not, um, it's not black and white and I just, I like that he said that because I think it sort of encapsulates that message,

24:39 but then you have an answer for that that is rather rosy because you have jenny saying that this has been healing not just for the chimps but also for Joseph, that, you know, this process of now having them welcome him when he comes to the island with food is a way for him to heal as well as them to heal. Which is like a wonderful statement on how close we really are. Chimpanzees visa, she likens it to, you know, like having someone in solitary confinement, you know, that it's their psychological damage and he suffered psychological damage to and now together their healing, which just, if I were reading it in a novel, I would say, oh my goodness, this is just too good to be true. Or it is.

25:28 That's quite an amazing part of the story, isn't it? And it's just all the ingredients of just such an incredible journey that they've been through are just there in the story. And know I just tried to bring them out a little bit, but all of that is real and that's, I think, I dunno, that's what attracted me to documentary because it just finding these stranger than fiction stories and bringing them out through film. I think it's really. It was really exciting.

25:53 Well, thank you. This has been wonderful to hear from you and I really appreciate the film that you've made and I can't wait to see what's happening in your future. So we'll, we'll keep watching.

26:08 Thank you.