Starvation As “Weapon Of War”: Oscar Contender ‘Hunger Ward’ Shows How Children Bear Brunt In Yemen Conflict
Deadline
1/14/2021
Abeer, one of the main subjects of Skye Fitzgerald’s short documentary
Hunger Ward, is as pretty as a fairytale princess, with eloquent brown eyes and a smile—when it appears—to melt the heart.
But the conditions of Abeer’s life, far from storybook, are those of cruel reality. She is one of an estimated two million children in Yemen facing starvation as a result of the country’s civil war.
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“This lack of food, or lack of access to food, it’s human-caused,” Fitzgerald tells Deadline. “We often think of famine, and we think of drought, we think of crop failure, we think of locusts. This is not the case in Yemen…Hunger being used as a weapon of war [is] such a horrible thought to me.”