Richard Hering / Stuart Tanner

Winners: Features

British
“Dispatches: Death On The Silk Road”
Shot: July - August 1998
Channel Four Television

The region of Xinjiang, known in the West as the land of the Silk Roads, is home to 16 million non-Chinese, the largest group of which is the Uighur people. Xinjiang is forbidden to foreign journalists. Here, between 1964 and 1996, the Chinese government carried out a massive nuclear weapons testing programme. The effect on the population was horrendous. The nature and extent of their suffering and the Chinese government's callous disregard for them, is the subject of Hering and Tanner's film. To secure concrete evidence, they worked undercover with Uighur contacts on the ground in China. It took them a year to find their contacts and make sure they were safe. The operation in Xinjiang took six weeks to carry out, with Hering and Tanner only too well aware that if they were caught, whoever was suspected of aiding them, whether they actually did so or not, could be imprisoned, mistreated and receive long prison sentences.

"Perhaps the most difficult thing of all is seeing the constant fear of those helping you and having to decide every day whether to continue to search for the crucial evidence, and to continue to risk their lives. Every day you know you are looking less and less like a normal tourist. It might seem almost silly, but we had a special knock for whenever we went to each other's rooms because any knock on the door could have been the nightmare one."

Biography

Stuart Tanner and Richard Hering formed DirectTV in 1994. Their first joint broadcast project was 'The Mahogany Trail' for Channel Four's Dispatches, (May 1996) which in June 1997 was awarded the Bill Travers' "Insight" Award at the London International Environmental Film Festival. In October 1997 Hering and Tanner were commissioned by Channel 4 News to make a film on ethnic conflict in China. The resulting ten minute feature, a Channel 4 exclusive, won the 1998 Amnesty International Press Award. 'Death on the Silk Road' an undercover investigation for Dispatches, broke the story of the consequences of China's nuclear test programme.

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