39 Facts About Vanya Kewley

Vanya Sarah Kewley was an Anglo-French journalist, documentary maker and nurse noted for her 1988 documentary film Tibet: A Case to Answer about the human rights situation in Tibet under Chinese rule.

Vanya Kewley moved to working on the ITV current affairs series This Week in 1972 and made several documentaries for the programme.

Vanya Kewley won her first award for a documentary about the South Korean human rights situations in 1977.

Vanya Kewley began planning Tibet: A Case to Answer in 1985 and the project was approved by Channel 4's commissioning editor David Lloyd.

Vanya Kewley entered the country via a tourist group and initially shared amateur filming equipment with the cinematographer Sean Bobbitt before he became ill.

Vanya Kewley returned to Tibet three years later to film a follow-up but stopped film making after being diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1993.

Vanya Kewley however returned to nursing and worked for the Red Cross in Bosnia and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Vanya Kewley was born on 8 November 1937 in Calcutta, India.

Vanya Kewley was the daughter of a French mother and her British-born father Coleman Kewley was a diplomat.

Vanya Kewley was handed her father's enthusiasm for studying comparative Asian religions and the Sanskrit language.

Vanya Kewley was educated in India, France and Switzerland primarily in Roman Catholic schools.

Vanya Kewley read philosophy and history at the Sorbonne which was the historical house of the University of Paris.

Vanya Kewley left before her first year was completed and instead moved to London to train as a registered nurse, working at the Charing Cross Hospital's casualty department.

Vanya Kewley later became a producer and director on the current affairs programme World in Action between 1968 and 1971.

In 1969, during her first foreign assignment and living without permission amongst "freedom fighters" Vanya Kewley was captured and beaten by soldiers while making a film about the problem of genocide in South Sudan.

Vanya Kewley filmed Khaled Mosharraf and other Bangladeshi freedom fighters in East Pakistan in 1971.

Vanya Kewley switched to the ITV current affairs series This Week in 1972 and made several documentaries for the programme.

Vanya Kewley made programmes about the 1972 Norwegian European Communities membership referendum and a fourteen-year-old boy imprisoned in Turkey on drug charges.

Vanya Kewley interviewed the exiled spiritual leader of Tibet the 14th Dalai Lama at his home in the Himalayas for the 1975 film The Lama King and this formed a lifelong friendship.

Vanya Kewley had a spell with the BBC and partook in the religious and ethics series Anno Domini between 1975 and 1977 and Everyman from 1977 to 1978.

Vanya Kewley interviewed the leader of Libya Muammar Gaddafi in the film Soldier for Islam in 1976.

Vanya Kewley won her first prize at the Montreux Festival in 1977 for a documentary about the human rights situation in South Korea filmed two years earlier.

Vanya Kewley documented the resurgence of Islam in Saudi Arabia in 1979 in an ITV film called The Year of the Prophet and calculated what economic and political implications this would have for the Western world.

Vanya Kewley investigated the issue of physical abuse of babies in the United Kingdom in the 1980 film Rosie's Story.

In 1985, Vanya Kewley was disturbed over the human rights situation in Tibet and started to establish contacts in the country.

Vanya Kewley persuaded Channel 4's commissioning editor David Lloyd to fund the channel's most expensive documentary at the time, for the current affairs series Dispatches.

Vanya Kewley entered Tibet with a guided tourist group and then deserted.

Vanya Kewley shared amateur filming equipment with the American cinematographer Sean Bobbitt but her plans were disintegrating after entering China on a three-month tourist visa as transport links were cancelled.

Vanya Kewley joined Bobbitt in Chengdu as part of group touring the Tibetan capital Lhasa for five days and discovered that natives were outnumbered by Chinese citizens in their own country.

Vanya Kewley filmed alone when Bobbitt left after becoming ill and continued her 4,000 miles journey by van into the region's interior and discovered babies being born with deformities near a nuclear plant with one Chinese doctor admitting to performing enforced abortions and sterilisations.

Vanya Kewley persuaded a French mountaineer to smuggle the majority of the film footage out of Tibet before leaving on her own flight.

Vanya Kewley courted controversy by interviewing her subjects without disguises but she responded that she attempted to persuade the interviewees to hide their identifies but they chose not to.

Vanya Kewley returned to Tibet in 1991 by smuggling herself into the country across the Himalayas hidden beneath the floorboards of a van to create the follow-up to Tibet: A Case to Answer, entitled Voices from Tibet shown on Channel 4.

Vanya Kewley revealed martial law was still present in Tibet despite claims from China that it had been ended.

Vanya Kewley stopped producing documentaries when she was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease in 1993.

However Vanya Kewley returned to Charing Cross Hospital in the early 1990s to undertake a refresher course before travelling to perform work for the Red Cross in Bosnia and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Vanya Kewley adopted and sponsored the education of two girls from Tibet and one boy from Rwanda.

On 14 October 2000, Vanya Kewley married the soil scientist Michael Lambert and the marriage ended with Lambert's death from bone cancer four years later.

Vanya Kewley died of pneumonia and Parkinson's disease on 17 July 2012 at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.