C. Khor
Iara Lee goes by many labels. Some call her an anti-war activist, others a human rights campaigner or a filmmaker.
The Brazilian prefers “gypsy”. She says she has travelled through more than 180 countries, “sprinkling seeds of hope”.
Now 60, she has documented since she was 19. This profile looks at her path, her methods and why she may soon stop.
From São Paulo to New York
She was born in 1966 in Brazil to Korean parents. From 1984 to 1989, she produced the São Paulo International Film Festival.
She then moved to New York to study film. From 1989 to 2003, she ran Caipirinha Productions, a mixed-media company.
It explored where film, music, architecture and poetry meet. Its films included Synthetic Pleasures and Modulations.
The big festivals liked her work. However, when she turned her camera on people who were suffering, she says “all the doors closed”.
She first wondered if she was a terrible filmmaker. Then she learnt that anyone who confronts power gets shut out.
So she took her films to refugee camps, classrooms, universities and small community venues. She did not rely on sales agents or distributors.
By her reckoning, only three or four of every 100 doors she knocks on open.
Iara Lee: Learning to listen
A lesson came in 2000 at a refugee camp in Peshawar, Pakistan. She was filming Afghan women and children when people turned on her crew with stones.
An old man shouted that filmmakers and journalists came every day. They took pictures and became famous, he said, while nothing improved for the camp.
She saw truth in that. Since then, she has stayed in touch with the people she films and supported them over the long term.
After the Iraq War began in 2003, she spent long periods in Syria, Yemen, Tunisia, Jordan and Lebanon. She also lived in Iran in 2008.
Those years led to her 2010 feature Cultures of Resistance. She also founded the Cultures of Resistance Network, which she still directs.
Later films took her to Western Sahara, Burkina Faso, Chornobyl and Malawi. The latest, The Sámi Song of Survival, came out in 2025.
She travels with one cameraman and arrives without a script. She would rather “let them tell the stories”, she says.
Giving back and slowing down
Iara Lee says making the film is “just 10% of the work”. The rest is getting people to see it.
That is why she came to the Hin Bus Depot, a former bus terminal turned arts space in George Town. Jedi Network and Ruang Kongsi co-organised two screenings.
On 27 September, the audience watched Unite for Bissau (2023). On 3 October, they saw From Trash to Treasure (2020), on artists in Lesotho.
She gives where she lands. In Kuala Lumpur, she offered to cover a year’s rent for a Somali refugee school facing eviction.
She has also funded 10 of 60 scholarships for students in the West Bank. She has backed orangutan conservation in Sabah since her first visit 10 years ago.
George Town won her over. She likes seeing a Hindu temple beside a mosque and a Chinese clan house. It is much like the Street of Harmony.
After so many countries, she is thinking of stopping. She talks of planting trees in Brazil, “like a symphony”.
She would leave the filming to the young. “My carbon footprint is just horrendous,” she said.
Navin Kumar Perianen
Sashidaran Gunathevan
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