Migration, war, resistance and life from some of my latest works.
Edited by the incredible Millefiore Clarkes
vimeo.com/millefioreclarkes
(onethousandflowers.tv)
Music: Ice Floe – Audionetwork
Colombia: predators in paradise
Dateline investigates Colombia’s booming sex tourism trade and the foreigners who come to prey on minors. We join police raids on brothels, hear from survivors and meet the accused now behind bars. September 2023
Reporter/producer: Calliste Weitenberg
Camera/producer: Bruno Federico
Local producer/additional camera: Simone Bruno
Editor: Micah McGown
The Confession
Jun 21, 2023
Fault Lines captures the confession of a Colombian colonel responsible for the deaths of 53 innocent civilians and asks their families for forgiveness in exchange for amnesty. In the mid-2000s, Colombia sought to prove it was finally winning its long-running war against the country’s armed rebels. Military top brass pressured ground troops to kill more fighters in action. As a result, soldiers executed thousands of civilians, framing them as rebel fighters, and called them “false positives”. Soldiers who delivered the highest body counts were rewarded with bonuses, promotions, and other perks. In 2022, Colombia’s truth commission revealed at least 6,402 civilians were executed between 2002 and 2008. Now, as a result of Colombia’s historic 2016 peace deal, military officials responsible for these atrocities can qualify for amnesty in exchange for truthful testimony about their war crimes.
Director: Jeremy Raff Producers: Bruno Federico, Simone Bruno, Jeremy Raff Directory of Photography: Bruno Federico and Jeremy Raff Editor: Leslie Atkins Executive Producer: Laila Al-Arian Fact Checking: Jeremy Young Digital Producer: Riham Mansour Archivist: Shelley Simpson Sound mix: Luke Rohwer Colorist: Edwin Rodriguez Special thanks: Kavitha Chekuru and Adrienne Haspel This project was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
New York City’s single seniors are on a post-pandemic search for love | SBS Dateline
Shaking off their frail and vulnerable image, New York City’s older-aged singles are navigating dating and sex on a renewed quest for intimacy. After two years in which they experienced some of the harshest forms of physical isolation due to the Covid-19 pandemic, many are joining younger singles in a post-vaccination dating boom. In her one-bedroom Hell’s Kitchen apartment in midtown Manhattan, 86-year-old Hattie “Retroage” tells SBS Dateline thats she is “both cursed and blessed” with a powerful sex drive.
Taking on Trump. ABC Foreign Correspondent
Wyoming is the most pro-Trump state in the country. And respected Republican Liz Cheney is about to find out what that means. Despite consistently backing Trump in office, she’s now one of his staunchest critics, attacking him for refusing to concede defeat in the 2020 election, and for his actions on January 6. As she seeks her party’s nomination for a 4th term in Congress, Donald Trump is going all out to stop her, endorsing and campaigning for another candidate, who’s also switched sides.
Producer/reporter: Kathryn Diss
Executive producer: Lisa McGregor
Camera: Bruno Federico
Editor: Leah Donovan
The Torn Apart
Sarah Ferguson reports on the fallout of a brutal US immigration policy that tore families apart. She tracks the journey of one mother seeking to reunite with her children after four painful years alone. “I begged them to please not take my mom. I told them that it would be better if they deported us to Mexico instead of separating her from me, but they told me…that I had to say goodbye.” It was condemned as cruel and inhumane. But before the US courts struck it down, Trump’s policy of separating children from their parents at the US-Mexico border did its work. Over 5000 children were removed. While many children stayed in the US, hundreds of parents were deported. Four years later, some families are finding each other again. In a Foreign Correspondent exclusive, Sarah Ferguson tells the powerful story of the first family to reunite since President Biden took office. The family of Honduran mother Keldy Gonzáles Brebe was one of the first to be caught up in a secretive US immigration program run in 2017. Its aim was to deter would-be migrants by separating parents from children. When Keldy crossed the US border into New Mexico in 2017, immigration officials separated her from her two sons, aged 13 and 15. “They told us they were going to separate us from her, that they were going to take us to a juvenile detention centre. I begged the immigration officers to let us go with her, but they said…I had to be separated from her”, says Keldy’s son Patrick, now 19. “From there I lost so many things from not seeing my children. I lost seeing their adolescence. I couldn’t be with them for four years’, Keldy tells Foreign Correspondent. For four years, Keldy marked time in Mexico. Then, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), she received the news she’d been waiting for. We follow Keldy from Mexico to Philadelphia, where her children now live, for the unforgettable scenes of mother and child reunion. We follow her story to Honduras to understand why she fled her home country, meet her family and friends on the Caribbean Coast and see first-hand the brutal violence that drove her to leave. After organising the execution of her brother, the notorious Honduran gang MS-13 threatened to kill Keldy too. We speak to lawyer Lee Gelernt from the ACLU who fought Trump’s immigration policy in the courts and is now helping to bring families back together. “I wanted to be here to see this first reunification”, says Gelernt. “I think you can’t really understand until you see it.’
- Reporter: Sarah Ferguson
- Producer: Tony Jones
- Digital producer: Matt Henry
- Photography: David Peinado, Hannah Yoon and Tony Jones
- Cinematography: Bruno Federico
What migrants face as they journey through the deadly Darien Gap
Whether fleeing war, persecution, poverty or the effects of climate change, migrants and refugees worldwide routinely find themselves in great danger. Perhaps the most hazardous migrant trail of all is the Darien Gap, a wild, lawless stretch straddling Colombia and Panama. Before the pandemic, special correspondent Nadja Drost and videographer Bruno Federico reported from this perilous path.
No Justice, No Peace: America’s Uprising against Police Brutality and Racism |ABC Foreign Correspondent
“We are in a state of emergency. Black people are dying in a state of emergency” Tamika Mallory, activist Pictures of a white Minneapolis police officer killing unarmed black man George Floyd provoked an immediate and furious response. Angry protests demanding an end to entrenched racism erupted in scores of cities across America. Floyd’s last words ‘I can’t breathe’ have become a rallying cry. White and black, young and old, across 50 states, have protested peacefully against police violence and racism.
ABC Foreign Correspondent. On New York City’s Coronavirus Frontline
The Big Apple is in bad shape. It’s the epicentre of the US fight against the corona virus outbreak. Its people are in lockdown while frontline services wage war against the pandemic. With over fourteen thousand dead, New York City accounts for around one third of all corona-related deaths in the US. Every day, there are hundreds of new infections and deaths. The city’s hospitals are overflowing, health workers lack medical and protective equipment and morgues have run out of space. Foreign Correspondent’s reporter Karishma Vyas, a New York resident, goes behind the lines of the city’s battle to slow infections, save lives, protect its vulnerable and bury the dead. We follow paramedics as they respond to emergency house calls, helping desperate families. We discover many who die of COVID-19 don’t make the official death toll. We film with the police union as they hand out desperately needed personal safety equipment to their officers. “I thought I’d seen it all on September 11th, but I’ve never seen anything like this. We’re anticipating this getting even worse. So that’s why we’re trying to get this equipment out to our guys”, says a Union officer. We speak with an ICU nurse who’s travelled from out of state to lend a hand in a Bronx hospital. He tells us about working double shifts, often with no break, and the pressure of looking after multiple critically ill patients at the same time. A good day is when none of his patients die. One overworked doctor describes his frustration with the US health system. “I’ve had people come in barely breathing and their first question isn’t ‘Am I going to survive?’ It’s ‘How is this going to impact my family financially?’” “This illness exposes all the fault-lines throughout American society”, says the doctor. And we catch up with characters who embody the city’s spirit of defiance and survival. “I want to be remembered as someone who never left the frontlines and who was essential”, says the Naked Cowboy, a performer whose stage is Times Square – rain, hail or coronavirus. This is an intimate and powerful portrait of a city in crisis. About Foreign Correspondent: Foreign Correspondent is the prime-time international public affairs program on Australia’s national broadcaster, ABC-TV. We produce half-hour duration in-depth reports for broadcast across the ABC’s television channels and digital platforms. Since 1992, our teams have journeyed to more than 170 countries to report on war, natural calamity and social and political upheaval – through the eyes of the people at the heart of it all.
PBS NewsHour. Yielding to U.S. pressure, Mexico clamps down on migrants
Thousands of migrants from around the world, many seeking asylum, have been trying to reach the U.S. by flying to South America and taking the long trek north. But after pressure from President Trump, Mexican authorities are stopping many migrants from passing through their country, stranding them in the city of Tapachula. Special correspondent Nadja Drost and videographer Bruno Federico report.
Bruno Federico 