Slavery on Film: Exposure or Exploitation?
Speaker: David Hickman

• Sunday 23 June 2013, 1.00PM
• Free admission
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• TFTV, University of York (See locations page)

Event details

Most forms of modern slavery occur far from the public gaze. Slavery takes place in a secretive world, physically out of view, denied by slave owners, and with documented evidence that the victims of slavery are subject to threats and worse. So how is it possible to film such vulnerable people - many of them children as young as seven or eight - without making their lives even more dangerous? David Hickman talks about three films he shot and directed - on child slavery on Haiti, bonded slaves in Pakistan and bride trafficking in India - and how he attempted to negotiate some of the profoundly difficult ethical dilemmas in telling slaves` stories.

Speaker biography

David Hickman is an Emmy Award winning documentary writer, director, producer and cinematographer, whose wide ranging portfolio has seen him work on dozens of esteemed projects across film and television for over twenty years. His profound skill and expertise in the field allow him to speak authoritatively about the challenging and delicate process of constructing films from actuality.

David’s most recent projects include the Grierson Award winning Race and Intelligence: Science’s Last Taboo for Channel 4, and three films for the Slavery: A 21st Century Evil series on Al Jazeera. This latter project was recently nominated for a prestigious IDA documentary award alongside entries from Martin Scorsese and Werner Herzog, and it is on filming this subject that David will speak. This talk/Q&A session offers a fantastic opportunity to learn how an experienced documentarian goes about portraying reality on screen.