LIBYA, THE WOMEN OF THE REVOLUTION

by Marie-Laure WIDMER BAGGIOLINI

27 minutes, 2011

Production : RTS / Suisse

Latifa, Ghalia and Asma. Wage-earner, student and mother at home, each in her own way has contributed to the revolution against Gaddafi, by helping refugees, protesting or simply sweeping streets. With open arms they welcomed the reporters from “Temps Présent”, foreigners with whom they shared their first moments of freedom in Benghazi, the rebel-held town.

Having graduated in television studies at the University of Quebec at Montreal (Canada), Marie-Laure WIDMER BAGGIOLINI has worked regularly for Télévision Suisse Romande. In 1998 she travelled through the Balkans as far as Iran, via the southern Caucasus. She sent live TV and radio reports from an Albania in the throes of revolution and made several news films for TSR, later shown at the Geneva Festival of North-South Media. From the end of 1998 to the summer of 2002 she was based in Tehran and filed frequent reports to TSR. She has also been sent to Iraq and Afghanistan. At the end of 2003 she set up a production company, Papilles Prod, with Annick Jeanmairet. Together they created “Pique-Assiette”, a series of 6-minute cookery programmes which won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Gourmet Voices Festival in 2006. In 2006 as an independent she made a current affairs film for Channel 4 on Somali refugees ship-wrecked off the coast of Yemen – images later used by Daniel Grandclément in his film “Les Martyrs du Golfe d’Aden”. Her film won an award at the FIGRA
festival in 2008. Marie-Laure continues to make 52-minute documentaries for the TSR programme “Temps Présent”.