KarinMuller

Thank YOU for an excellent question! When we see a war zone on TV, it's all drama and danger. The truth is tons of tedium and low level stress, punctuated by moments of extreme action. For me the greatest stress is having to evaluate every local as potentially hostile. Having to think the worst of people goes against my personal belief system and wears me down emotionally. Revolutions (like the Arab spring) - at least initially - are absolutely the opposite. Tahrir was a huge party - fireworks and face paint for the children. People singing and dancing to the tambourine. Old women in wheelchairs and mothers with their newborn babies. For the first five nights of the second revolution, even strangers were friends.

The short answer is I bought a camera, hitchhiked around Vietnam for seven months, came home and cobbled together a demo, and spent the next two years convincing PBS to turn it into a one-hour special.
How do YOU get into it? There a thousand paths and I don't know enough about your background to be very helpful. Let me offer two general suggestions: You need three things: Tenacity, serendipity, and ability. The tenacity to knock on a thousand doors. The serendipity that one of those doors will finally open. And then enough ability to get invited through it when it does. The more tenacity you have, the less serendipity you need. I know this sounds like a cliche, but much of filmmaking is just sticking with it until you get good enough and/or you are the last man/woman standing. My second suggestion is a bit grimmer. You have to want it more than anything else in your life. I am not married and never had children. I've never owned a house. I've lived in 30 places in the past 18 years. The longest relationship I've ever had is with my bicycle. I can't even successfully raise arugula. You have to be willing to sacrifice all of that - and more - because you are competing with people like me and we are willing to make those sacrifices. That said, if I retired today I would do exactly the same thing tomorrow. I am utterly and blissfully happy with my life. I'm not sure many people could say that about their jobs.

This may surprise you, but being a woman (vs a man) can be quite an asset. As a woman, you have far more access to local women. Because you are a Westerner, you also have some access to men that local women wouldn't have. You are thought of as something akin to a third gender - not quite female (but harmless to females) and not quite male (but with enough credibility to hang with them). Other advantages: people want to help and protect you. Women in particular look out for you. If you're in the Middle East you can wear a burka and become practically invisible. Men are not intimidated by you so it's easier to talk your way out of trouble.

Preventing sexual assault. #1 - don't get into a stupid situation in the first place. You need to develop a really good set of social antenna and study the history/language/politics/ and culture of the place you are going to. If you don't speak the language fluently then get a really good fixer and listen to him/her. If all else fails - I have two black belts and boxed for a couple of years. All of which is completely useless when everyone else has a machine gun. Keep your cool and talk your way out of it.

Good question. I do a lot of lecturing at universities. Too often a young woman will come up to me and say, "I really want to travel but I'm too afraid to go alone." I guess my title was a clumsy attempt to try to counteract the stereotype that you have to be male to do this job. I also think that a woman's perspective and experience in this particular profession is quite different than a man's. May I turn the question back to you? If I had not written (female), would you have assumed that I was a man?

Are you referring to the mob attack? You have to put it in context - The entire fabric of Egyptian society was under such stress that it was being torn to pieces. People were terrified - dictatorship was all they knew and democracy was looking a lot like civil war. The immediate spark for the mob in my case was someone shouting that I was a spy. Again, context: the Egyptian gov't controls the TV stations and broadcasts endless images of US/Western drone strikes, entire villages in rubble, dead children, etc. That mob was not afraid of me - they were afraid of what I represented. I showed up with a big camera and a lot of gear (the first westerner they had seen in their village in twenty years) and they assumed I was a CIA agent - and that drones/soldiers were probably not far behind me. In their minds they were defending their village, their families, and their children. Yes, mobs were very common (they still are). The three words you do not ever want to hear shouted at you in Egypt are Blasphemer, Shiite (it's a Sunni country), and spy.