The Frontline Club

There are 12 billion bullets produced every year – almost two bullets for every person on the planet. Guns kill as many as 500,000 people every year. Tearing lives apart, they impact not only the dead, the wounded, the suicidal and the mourning, but have far-reaching effects on society and communities.In a hard-hitting exploration, award-winning investigative journalist Iain Overton journeyed to over 25 countries, from South Africa to Iceland, Honduras to Cambodia, to try and understand the true impact of gun crime.From porn starlets who appear as snipers in XXX films, Zionist anti-terror gun trainers, El Salvadoran gangland killers and South African doctors soaked in the blood of gunshot victims, Overton tells the harrowing and sobering stories of lives directly affected by guns.Iain Overton will be joining us in conversation with writer and author of The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade,Andrew Feinstein, to discuss what he has learnt about the impact of gun crime, the relationships we have with guns and the place they occupy in every day life.Iain Overton is Director of Investigations at the London-based charity Action on Armed Violence and an investigative journalist who has worked in over eighty countries around the world. Reporting from the killing zones of Colombia, Iraq and Somalia, he has made films for the BBC, ITN and Al Jazeera, as well as working with The Guardian, The Independent and The Sunday Times. He was founding editor of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and is author of Gun Baby Gun.

Sao Paulo, one of the largest cities in the world, may run out of water in the next few months leaving 20 million people high and dry. Who is to blame? Incompetent politicians, unpredictable weather patterns or the wholesale destruction of Amazonia’s rainforests?How does a country that produces an estimated 12% of the world’s fresh water end up with a chronic shortage of this most essential resource?Join us for the second in a series of events held in partnership with The Scientific Exploration Society, as we bring together explorers, scientists and journalists to examine the water shortage in Brazil and debate the wider questions about global water security.Chaired by Andrew Mitchell, a rainforest explorer advocate. He is the chairman of the Scientific Exploration Society, a forest canopy explorer, founder of the Global Canopy Programme, co-founder of Earthwatch Europe, and Personal Advisor to HRH The Prince of Wales’ Rainforest Project.The panel:Peter Bunyard is an author, journalist and founder of The Ecologist. He spent many years exploring and lecturing on the subject of indigenous responsibilities in the Colombian Amazon. More recently, having been alerted to the Biotic Pump theory, he carried out studies in Costa Rica and back home in Cornwall to test the physics of the theory, amassing evidence to challenge current climate modelling on the impact of deforestation in the Amazon Basin.Sue Cunningham is a photographer, author and trustee of Tribes Alive/Indigenous People’s Cultural Support Trust. She and her husband Patrick Cunningham were awarded the Neville Shulman prize by the Royal Geographical Society for their Heart of Brazil Expedition travelling on the Xingu river by boat, visiting 48 tribal villages and documenting the affects of climate change and man’s dramatic impact on the rain forest.Rogerio Simoes is a Brazilian journalist based in London. He is a former head of the BBC’s Brazilian Service and has written about Brazil for the CNN website. He was also executive-editor at Brazilian weekly news magazine Epoca and opinion editor and London correspondent at Folha de S.Paulo newspaper.Nixiwaka Yawanawa, represents the 900 strong Yawanawa tribe, the ‘People of the Wild Boar’ of Acre within the western Amazon rainforest of Brazil, an area recently decimated by terrible flooding. He is currently working for Survival International, the global movement for tribal peoples’ rightsDr Friederike Otto is a senior researcher at the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, leading the distributed volunteer computing project climateprediction.net. Her main research interest is the attribution of extreme weather events to external climate drivers. A major focus of this work is to explore the propagation of uncertainty from external drivers to actual impacts of climate change and assess associated risks.

The Tim Hetherington Trust invites you to celebrate the lives of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros with a review of new work by friends, colleagues and others who are continuing the mission to share important stories powerfully told.April 20th marks the fourth anniversary of the mortar attack that took Tim and Chris’ lives. Tonight’s program will demonstrate their living legacy with an array of new work that will stimulate and provoke in the style we came to expect from them. Starting with Tim’s earliest experiments in multimedia the evening will unfold to show projects recently completed and work still in progress by recognised names and emerging talent, accompanied by discussion of how to harness the media for more effective communication.Topaz Adizes, filmmaker, will talk about some astonishing film projects that he was developing with Tim in 2011 and how his creative work has since evolved.Paul Halliday, friend and collaborator with Tim during his time with The Big Issue and now a lecturer at Goldsmiths College, will introduce the forthcoming “Urban Encounters” festival at Tate Britain and how Tim’s work will find a place nearly 20 years on.Geoff Johnson, artist, curator and studio partner with Tim in the 90’s will talk about “Manorism” a current exhibition of international graffiti art and will describe the discussions behind Tim’s Liberian war graffiti and its continuing relevance.Eline Jongsma  Kel O’Neill, winners of the inaugural Visionary Award from the Tim Hetherington Trust, will talk about their practice that is evolving to include filmmaking, interactive media and virtual reality media.Guy Martin, photographer, friend and thinker will show some current work and discuss it in the context of contemporary documentary practice. How has Tim’s thinking influenced the picture and how is it developing?Daniel Meadows, Tim’s teacher at the Centre for Journalism Studies at Cardiff University will recount his last phone conversation with Tim which re-inspired his commitment to training and the importance of basic principles even as the industry changes.We expect a provocative evening of images, ideas and words so please come to listen and share as we look back a their lives and forwards to what’s coming next.

The Tim Hetherington Trust invites you to celebrate the lives of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros with a review of new work by friends, colleagues and others who are continuing the mission to share important stories powerfully told.April 20th marks the fourth anniversary of the mortar attack that took Tim and Chris’ lives. Tonight’s program will demonstrate their living legacy with an array of new work that will stimulate and provoke in the style we came to expect from them. Starting with Tim’s earliest experiments in multimedia the evening will unfold to show projects recently completed and work still in progress by recognised names and emerging talent, accompanied by discussion of how to harness the media for more effective communication.Topaz Adizes, filmmaker, will talk about some astonishing film projects that he was developing with Tim in 2011 and how his creative work has since evolved.Paul Halliday, friend and collaborator with Tim during his time with The Big Issue and now a lecturer at Goldsmiths College, will introduce the forthcoming “Urban Encounters” festival at Tate Britain and how Tim’s work will find a place nearly 20 years on.Geoff Johnson, artist, curator and studio partner with Tim in the 90’s will talk about “Manorism” a current exhibition of international graffiti art and will describe the discussions behind Tim’s Liberian war graffiti and its continuing relevance.Eline Jongsma  Kel O’Neill, winners of the inaugural Visionary Award from the Tim Hetherington Trust, will talk about their practice that is evolving to include filmmaking, interactive media and virtual reality media.Guy Martin, photographer, friend and thinker will show some current work and discuss it in the context of contemporary documentary practice. How has Tim’s thinking influenced the picture and how is it developing?Daniel Meadows, Tim’s teacher at the Centre for Journalism Studies at Cardiff University will recount his last phone conversation with Tim which re-inspired his commitment to training and the importance of basic principles even as the industry changes.We expect a provocative evening of images, ideas and words so please come to listen and share as we look back a their lives and forwards to what’s coming next.

Days after the September 11 attacks, a CIA Predator in Afghanistan executed the world’s first lethal drone strike. The technology used had been nurtured and developed by the agency for almost a decade, with the aim to monitor targets and take lethal action instantly.Since then, remotely-piloted aircraft have played a critical role in America’s global counterterrorism operations and have been deployed in conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. They are also used in a secret war, a war that the American government insists is legal, in which drones scour the skies of Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia in search of militant and terrorist targets.The CIA claims that its armed drones are ‘the most precise weapon ever invented,’ but what is the true cost? In a new book,Sudden Justice, investigative journalist Chris Woods explores the secretive history of the United States’ use of armed drones. He will be joining us to explore that history and the key role they play on today’s battlefields and in covert targeted killings.Chris Woods is a widely-published investigative journalist who specialises in conflict and national security issues. A former senior BBC Panorama producer, he has authored some of the key investigations into covert US drone strikes and their true effects. He was recently awarded the Martha Gellhorn Journalism Prize for his work.Chaired by Mark Urban, diplomatic and defence editor for BBC Two’s Newsnight. He is the author of several books including Big Boys’ Rules: The SAS and the Secret Struggle Against the IRA, The Tank War and Task Force Black: The explosive true story of the SAS and the secret war in Iraq.

Born to a poor immigrant family in Philadelphia in 1912, Eve Arnold became a photographer by chance. She was a 38-year-old housewife living in Long Island when she enrolled in a six-week photography course which led to her groundbreaking photo essay on black fashion models in Harlem, and later to her becoming the first woman to join Magnum Photos.In a career that spanned most of the latter half of the twentieth century, she captured intimate portraits of figures such as Marilyn Monroe, Malcolm X, and Queen Elizabeth, and documented the lives of migrant workers, disabled veterans, and civil rights activists in the US and against apartheid in South Africa.In the first volume of a major new series of illustrated biographies of Magnum photographers, journalist Janine di Giovanni traces the life and achievements of Eve Arnold. She will be joining us in conversation with documentary photographer Susan Meiselas, to share the story and show the work of one of the most accomplished photojournalists of the twentieth century.Janine di Giovanni is the award-winning Middle East editor of Newsweek and a contributing editor to Vanity Fair. She knew Eve Arnold personally and considered her a mentor of sorts. Di Giovanni’s books include Ghosts by Daylight, Madness Visibleand The Place at the End of the World: Essays from the Edge.Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer and member of Magnum Photos since 1976. She is the author of Carnival Strippers, Nicaragua, Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History, Pandora’s Box and Encounters with the Dani. She has co-edited two collections: El Salvador, Work of 30 Photographers and Chile from Within. She is currently the president and acting executive director of the Magnum Foundation.

In 2000, Srdja Popovic was one of the leaders of the Serbian nonviolent resistance group Otpor! that helped topple Slobodan Milošević. Then in 2003 he decided to use his experience to help pro-democracy activists around the world, teaching them how to bring down a dictator.From the streets of Egypt to New York, Popovic teaches a toolkit of resistance, promoting the use of non-violence to achieve political and social goals.In his new book, Blueprint for Revolution, Popovic documents his own journey from Belgrade rock kid to revolutionary leader, as well as sharing the stories of the many revolutionaries he has met along the way.He will be joining us in conversation with Steve Crawshaw, director of the office of the secretary general at Amnesty International and co-author of Small Acts of Resistance, to share his story and the ingenious ways in which non-violent resistance has achieved its means around the world, from Occupy Wall Street to Tahrir Square, and from Nelson Mandela to Harvey Milk.Srdja Popovic is a Serbian biologist, political activist and executive director of the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS). As the director of CANVAS, Popovic has consulted with revolutionary activists from countries including Egypt, Syria and Tunisia. The PRIO tipped him to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Wired listed him as one of 50 people who will change the world and he was one of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders for 2013.

From Egypt to Mexico, Russia to Syria, journalists are increasingly coming under attack. They are murdered, imprisoned and intimidated for doing their job. If this continues we will face a growing crisis in information – a shortage of the news that we need to make sense of our globalised world, and to fight human rights abuses, understand conflict, and hold power to account.As executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Joel Simon is on the frontline of the global battle for media freedom. In his latest book, The New Censorship, he details that battle and offers a prescription for how to counter these new challenges.Simon will be joining us to offer an insight into the problems we face and to examine what needs to be done to ensure future generations are not deprived of a free press.Chaired by Richard Sambrook, Professor of Journalism and Director at the Centre for Journalism, Cardiff University. He is a former director of Global News at the BBC where he worked for 30 years as a journalist, producer, editor and manager. He is the chairman of the International News Safety Institute (INSI).Joel Simon is the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and has written widely on media issues. He is a regular contributor to Slate and the Columbia Journalism Review, and his articles and commentary have appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New York Times, World Policy Journal, and other publications. He is also the author of Endangered Mexico: An Environment on the Edge.

The rocket that shot down flight MH17 was actually intended for Vladimir Putin’s plane. That is, if we were to believe the headline Russia Today (RT) was running in the first hours after the tragedy. The disaster with the Malaysian Airlines flight wasn’t the first time the news channel stirred controversy with its reporting. In November of 2014, Ofcom gave RT a warning for impartial reporting on the uprising in Maidan Square in Kiev.The channel was launched in 2005 under the name Russia Today to bring the Russian perspective on world events to a global audience. Almost ten years later, RT broadcasts in five languages and can be received almost all over the world. It is now the biggest news organisation on YouTube with 2 billion views, more then CNN and BBC together.Its critics call it a bullhorn for Russian propaganda, RT claims only to show a different perspective on world events, and presents itself as an alternative to the mainstream media. In Misja Pekel’s The World According to Russia Today, current and former employees, journalists and media analysts dissect RT’s modus operandi. What is it like to work for the channel? How much influence does the Kremlin really have? And is it possible to discern between fact and opinion when Russian interests are at stake?Directed by Misja PekelDuration: 40′Year: 2015The Panel:Ben Judah is the author of Fragile Empire: How Russia Fell In And Out Of Love With Vladimir Putin published by Yale University Press.Peter Pomerantsev is an author, TV producer, and Senior Fellow at the Legatum Institute. Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, his book about working in Russian media, was released by Faber in February. It has been short listed for the Pushkin House Award for Russia books, and was a BBC Book of the Week.Richard Gizbert is a Canadian broadcast journalist. He is the presenter of the Listening Post on Al Jazeera English. Over the past 25 years, he has covered stories in more than 50 countries on five continents.

From Afghanistan to Iraq, Darfur to Libya, Lynsey Addario has spent the past decade and a half capturing life on the frontline.It was after the September 11 attacks, when the world changed, that Addario made the decision to embark on a career in photojournalism. It is a path that in subsequent years would see her travel around the world, from crisis to conflict, documenting the human cost of war. In her new book, It’s What I Do, she details the journey.Lynsey Addario will be joining us in conversation with editor-in-charge of Reuters Wider Image, Alexia Singh, to share her story of how a relentless pursuit of truth, in virtually every major theatre of war in the twenty-first century, has shaped her life.Lynsey Addario is an American photojournalist whose work appears regularly in The New York Times, National Geographic, and Time Magazine. She has covered conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Darfur and the Congo, and has received numerous awards, including the MacArthur Genius Grant and the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting.

In late October, Camp Bastion, Britain’s biggest overseas base since World War Two, was handed over to Afghan control, marking the end of 13 years of British combat operations in Afghanistan. With countless civilian and military casualties, many will now be asking what has been achieved.We will be joined by those who served in Afghanistan and the journalists who covered the country, to take a comprehensive view of the conflict from its inception after 9/11 to the withdrawal. Looking at the decisions that were made and the consequences of those actions, we will be examining the lessons that should be learned by British and coalition forces.Chaired by David Loyn, the Afghanistan correspondent for the BBC. He is the author of Frontline: Reporting from the World’s Deadliest Places and Butcher and Bolt: Two Hundred Years of Foreign Engagement in Afghanistan.The panel:Jack Fairweather is currently a fellow of the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University. He was the Daily Telegraph’s Baghdad and Gulf correspondent for five years. He is an expert on the American and British military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, and author of A War of Choice: Britain in Iraq 2003-9 and The Good War: Why We Couldn’t Win the War or the Peace in Afghanistan.Mike Martin is a former pushtu-speaking British Army officer who spent almost two years in Helmand both serving and researching. During that time he also worked as an advisor to four senior British officers in charge of the British Helmand campaign. Last April, he published his history of the conflict, An Intimate War, in the face of an attempted ban by the Ministry of Defence.Major General Jonathan Shaw recently retired from the British Army after 32 years during which time he commanded operations at every rank up to Major General. He has gained extensive operational experience in the Falklands, Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is author of Britain in a Perilous World: The Strategic Defence and Security Review we need.Jawed Nader is the director of the British Irish Agencies Afghanistan Group (BAAG). He has extensive experience of working with both Afghan civil society and the Afghan Government. Since 2002, he has been working on promoting civil society and good governance in Afghanistan. He has worked as Programme Adviser and Director of the Afghanistan Land Authority in the Afghan Ministry of Agriculture (2009-2011), and as Advocacy Manager with the Afghan Civil Society Forum (2002-2006).

In his first trip to London after 400 days in jail, Al Jazeera journalist Peter Greste will discuss his relief at being released as well as calling for the unconditional dismissal of the case against colleagues Baher Mohamed and Mohamed Fahmy. Peter will also talk about how he managed to get through the ordeal and the wider press freedom campaign.

Four years ago, Libya dominated the headlines as the country struggled to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi. Now, despite the fact that this country of vital importance in the region is sliding into civil war, it has all but disappeared from the news.As well as the violence, the people of Libya are also facing chronic power shortages and escalating prices of basic everyday goods. The local media that flourished after the revolution has been killed off and human rights organisations have left the country. Now with foreign powers backing different factions the conflict looks set to take on new dimensions.In a new book, The Libyan Revolution and its Aftermath, leading journalists, academics and specialists trace the journey from the outbreak of protests in Benghazi in February 2011 to the subsequent conflict. Some of its contributors and other experts will be joining us to offer an insight into what led to the current crisis and how Libya might be able to rebuild itself.Chaired by BBC journalist Mohamed Madi.The panel:Guma el-Gamaty is a Libyan politician and was National Transitional Council (NTC) envoy to the UK during the 2011 revolution.Abdul Rahman al-Ageli is co-Founder of the Libyan Youth Forum. He also worked as a security coordinator in the Libyan prime minister’s office.Mary Fitzgerald is a journalist who has reported from Libya since February 2011 and lived there throughout 2014.Elham Saudi is co-founder and director of Lawyers for Justice in Libya (LFJL) and associate fellow at Chatham House’s International Law Programme and Middle East and North Africa Programme.Peter Cole is a former International Crisis Group Libya analyst who has also worked for the UN mission in Libya.

Founded by a group of award-winning photographers committed to covering the stories affecting the world around them, and in partnership with Libre, a group of web-passionate developers, Me-Mo is a documentary photography magazine that strives to push the limits of visual storytelling.Following the release of issue #1, out on digital newsstands from 19 January, Me-Mo co-founders Manu Brabo and Fabio Bucciarelli and Libre president Matteo Dispenza, will be joining us at the Frontline Club to present the project and the inspiration behind it, and to talk about how technology is influencing new medias. Brabo and Bucciarelli will also present their work, featured in issue #1, on the Libyan revolution.The speakers:Manu Brabo is a freelance photojournalist whose work has mainly focused on social conflicts worldwide. Since 2007 he has been working on political upheavals, uprisings and wars in countries such as Haiti, Honduras, Kosovo, Libya, Egypt, Syria and Ukraine. Amongst other awards of merit, he is the 2013 Pulitzer prize laureate for his work covering the Syrian civil war for The Associated Press.Brabo’s featured work in Me-Mo magazine issue #1 is a long-term and personal approach to a subject he has experienced first-hand: imprisonment in a Libyan jail. Fabio Bucciarelli is a documentary photographer focused on conflicts and the humanitarian consequences of war. He has spent the past few years covering the major events in Africa and the Middle East, notably in Syria, Libya and South Sudan. He has won numerous awards, including the Robert Capa Gold Medal and World Press Photo.Bucciarelli’s ongoing report on the complexities of covering the Libyan revolution is featured in Me-Mo magazine issue #1. Matteo Dispenza began his career as a reporter for Italian television; he worked at Televideo Rai and on projects such as a screenplay for Universal Pictures / Cattleya. He then began to work on web design projects and soon founded Libre, a creative digital group based in Turin. He is currently Professor of Innovation and New Media at Istruzione Tecnica Superiore Foundation in Turin, as well as managing the technical aspects of Me-Mo magazine. Chaired by Paul Lowe, the course director of the Masters Programme in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. He is an award-winning photographer, whose work is represented by Panos Pictures, and who has been published in Time, Newsweek, Life, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Observer and The Independent amongst others. He has covered breaking news the world over, including the fall of the Berlin Wall, Nelson Mandela’s release, famine in Africa, the conflict in the former Yugoslavia and the destruction of Grozny.

Orania is situated in South Africa’s Northern Cape province. All of the 800 inhabitants are white Afrikaans people, also referred to as Boers. They refuse to be part of the “Rainbow Nation”. With their own flag and currency the inhabitants create a cultural homeland to preserve their heritage and live independently from the state.Director Tobias Lindner carefully observes this culturally homogeneous society situated in the middle of a multicultural country, and explores the mechanisms behind the societal experiment. It would be easy to play on the town’s eccentricities, instead Lindner thoughtfully portrays a community where the lines are blurred between open discrimination and the right to self-determination and preservation of tradition.Directed by Tobias LindnerDuration: 94′Year: 2012f