Kent Hernández/Fusion
June 20, 2017
In The Mix

Have No Fear

Susan King

Nelufar Hedayat doesn’t perceive herself as particularly brave.

“I think we all have a different appetite for risk,” says the Afghan- born journalist, who fled with her family to England at age six when the Taliban came to power.

But Hedayat certainly put herself at risk in The Traffickers, her eight-part investigative series for Fusion (available on iTunes). In El Salvador, she followed cops as they hunted down gun smugglers, and in South Africa she tracked the rhino-horn trade.

Joining her on her investigations was a small crew of three or four, ensuring she would get “raw, untapped feelings and emotions. Whatever the situation might be, you have to be incredibly sensitive to the issue you are covering.”

A student of language, she decided to become a journalist while attending London’s Westminster University. “I loved the idea that with language, you can open up an entire universe to a person,” she says.

Hedayat, who is Muslim, was 19 when she returned to war-torn Afghanistan to make her first film for the BBC, Women, Weddings, War and Me, exploring violence against women.

“I was exactly what the BBC needed when they needed it,” she notes. “I was very internationalist, a very open-minded young person wanting to explore the world and tell stories.”

After five years at the BBC doing documentaries, she moved to Channel 4’s foreign-affair series, Unreported World, where her harrowing piece on Vietnam’s unregulated dog-meat trade flooded the program’s Twitter account.

Receiving feedback from viewers “bloody warms the cockles of your heart,” she says, “especially from young women — definitely Muslim, definitely Afghan — saying, ‘I saw myself on television.’ People want to see a reflection of themselves on television. Not everyone is a white Christian man.”

Hedayat maintains she’s never going to “tangibly” make a difference. “It’s rare to change policy or action. But there’s a certain level of self-power at play here. You can make people think and galvanize opinion and thought.” 


This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 6, 2017

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