05/10/2026
Tuesday 6th Oct 2026 19:00 at the Frontline Club Paddington
Tickets: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1996817863984?aff=oddtdtcreator
In 2015, as the Syrian refugee crisis dominated the international news agenda, journalist Jeanne Carstensen and filmmakers Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes were reporting in Greece and Turkey. Ten years on, their work asks what it means to stay with the people behind a story long after the headlines have moved on.
Carstensen’s A Greek Tragedy: One Day, a Deadly Shipwreck, and the Human Cost of the Refugee Crisis reconstructs the deadly October 2015 shipwreck off Lesvos through the lives of refugees, local residents, volunteers and rescuers caught up in the disaster. Azzam and MacInnes’ documentary One in a Million, filmed over ten years, follows Israa from childhood to adulthood as she and her family leave Syria, make the dangerous journey to Germany and build a new life in Europe before returning to Syria.
Bringing these two projects together, this discussion will explore what sustained reporting demands of journalists and filmmakers. How do you build and maintain trust over many years? What responsibilities come with documenting people through trauma, exile and upheaval? How does the relationship between reporter and subject change over time? And what can long-form documentary and narrative nonfiction reveal about displacement that the daily news cycle cannot?
Join us for a conversation about reporting beyond the news cycle, the ethics and intimacy of telling other people’s stories, and the challenge of preserving individual lives within a humanitarian crisis of enormous scale.
