Anna Neistat of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Netflix documentary E-Team talks about her humanitarian work, from Moscow to Nauru.
Our latest interview is with Anna Neistat. After spending decades working for Human Rights Watch, she is now a senior director with Amnesty International.
Anna Neistat is also the star of Netflix documentary, E-Team. The film follows a small team of humanitarian workers who make up the eponymous Emergency Team of Human Rights Watch.
The cameras show E-Team members Anna Neistat, her husband Ole Solvang, Peter Bouckaert and Fred Abrahams, at home as well as in the field.
E-Team won the award for best cinematography in a US documentary at the Sundance Film Festival 2014.
American journalist James Foley shot some of the E-Team’s footage before being captured and killed in Syria shortly before the film’s release.
In this interview, Anna Neistat shares more of her meaningful work. She speaks about the so-called “refugee crisis”, Russian propaganda and protest, and the future of humanitarian work.
She is one of the few humanitarians to have visited the remote island of Nauru, a tiny country in Micronesia, 1,800 miles north-east of Australia.
This is where the Australian government is forcibly sending people who have tried to seek asylum in Australia.
Neistat says refugees are held for a year or more in a fenced and tented refugee processing centre.
Having worked in several war zones, Anna Neistat says, “I had rarely seen something as desperate and horrendous as Nauru.”
Her report for Amnesty International said the treatment of refugees on Nauru amounted to torture.
Having grown up in Moscow, Neistat shares her memories of the fall of the Soviet regime.
She speaks about Putinism and Russia’s new protest movement, led by young people.
