Meet the team behind The Valley
It pays to keep a low profile in Afghanistan. For the Stuff Circuit team, that wasn’t always possible. A crew filming a documentary about our decadelong deployment in the country is bound to draw attention.
In the highly-charged streets of Kabul, investigators Paula Penfold, Eugene Bingham and Phil Johnson had a number of run-ins with the authorities.
‘‘Hideous,’’ cameraman Johnson says of the logistical challenges. ‘‘It was an awful place for filming.’’
‘‘Basically, you can’t stick your head out anywhere. It’s all about flying under the radar.’’
At one point, simply filming a mural in the middle of the city led to the team being interrogated for half an hour by local police. Staying in one place for too long, they learned, could lead to complications. There’s a high risk of kidnapping, and officials are notoriously corrupt.
‘‘We’d done lots and lots of research about it, obviously, but nothing can prepare you for actually being there on the ground,’’ says Bingham.
‘‘It’s quite an extraordinary place to be just as a human being, living day-to-day with that sort of latent threat all the time.’’
The trip came after years of research and back and forths with an unco-operative New Zealand Defence Force. Stuff Circuit’s latest project, The Valley, raises disturbing questions around our military’s transparency, and signifies a number of ‘‘firsts’’ in New Zealand journalism.
So who are the investigators behind it?
Penfold, Bingham and Toby Longbottom worked for Mediaworks’ 3D Investigates before the programme was controversially axed by the broadcaster.
They are well-known for their three-year investigation into the Teina Pora miscarriage of justice case, which was credited with helping get Pora released from prison.
Soon after being made redundant in late 2015, they started at Stuff. Johnson, a news cameraman from Mediaworks, joined them a few months later.
The foursome is collectively known as Stuff Circuit, described by Spinoff editor Duncan Greive as ‘‘Fairfax’s video answer to the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team’’. They are a crack investigative unit given the luxury of time – years, if necessary – to produce quality indepth journalism.
This year the team won a Canon Media Award for Private Business, Public Failure, a six-part documentary series examining our prison system.
‘‘This is a very talented team of journalists and their skills and the work they produce is really worldclass,’’ says Fairfax group executive editor Sinead Boucher.
‘‘I admire the way they marry great investigative skills with an absolutely beautiful creative visual style to their work. It is very distinctive and absorbing.’’
The Valley comes out of a firsttime partnership between two of New Zealand’s biggest media companies, Fairfax and Mediaworks, and is funded by NZ on Air.
‘‘It is a really interesting experiment and unprecedented package,’’ Penfold says.
‘‘Mediaworks has a broadcast documentary that runs on Monday on TV3, and Fairfax has the online documentary series and the virtual reality and the interactive website.’’
‘‘It has been a very good collaboration from my point of view,’’ adds Boucher, ‘‘and I am glad The Valley story is being taken to as wide a national audience as possible.’’ The project is truly crossmedia, even delving into virtual reality. The Guardian and the New York Times have experimented with virtual reality as a journalistic tool, but it has never been done here.
Bingham says the team first became interested in New Zealand’s deployment in Afghanistan when the Defence Force released a three-minute video clip from the Battle of Baghak, a fatal clash between Kiwi soldiers and insurgents in 2012.
Analysis revealed the footage had been manipulated.
Spurred on by senior military sources who said they were merely scraping the surface, they pushed the Defence Force for more footage, eventually obtaining 23 minutes’ worth.
They expanded their investigation beyond that single battle, also examining the 2004 firefight in Uruzgan Province for which Willie Apiata was awarded his Victoria Cross.
Bingham, Penfold and Johnson headed to Afghanistan for two weeks. They wanted to get a clearer picture of both battles, and ask wider questions about why the Defence Force was there, what it achieved, and what the wartorn country is like now.
‘‘It was an incredible country to be in,’’ Penfold continues. ‘‘It was mind-blowing on so many levels, and we’d previously thought that we might be able to tell the story without going to Afghanistan but now with the benefit of hindsight and knowing what we learned there, it was worth it.’’
While his colleagues were in the Middle East, Longbottom remained in New Zealand, meticulously analysing the metadata of the Defence Force footage, taken from different cameras, times and places. It was like putting together a puzzle.
Journalist Jon Stephenson, who has an extensive contacts network in Afghanistan, worked with the abroad team as an associate producer, helping them find their way around the volatile country.
The subject matter in The Valley differs from the botched SAS raid covered in the book Stephenson co-authored with Nicky Hager, Hit and Run.
Boucher calls the finished product ‘‘really extraordinary’’.
‘‘I know Kiwis will find it a really powerful piece of journalism that will make them think more deeply when we are next called upon to partake in supporting a war effort or reconstruction.’’
On paper, Stuff Circuit consists
‘‘I feel really lucky because I do feel as though the product is greater than the sum of its parts. None of us could do this work individually – it’s just too much work.’’ Paula Penfold
of a reporter (Penfold), producer (Bingham), editor (Longbottom) and cameraman (Johnson) – but these roles had a tendency to wash together, working on something as big as The Valley.
Nobody seems in charge, per se. ‘‘You’re the boss,’’ Longbottom jokes to Penfold. ‘‘God, I’m not the boss!’’ she replies.
‘‘Paula’s one of the most experienced investigative reporters in television in the country,’’ Bingham puts in, ‘‘and we’re lucky to have that presence and those interviewing skills, to be able to get across these things that we find out.’’
‘‘What are you going to say about yourself?’’ Penfold laughs. ‘‘Eugene is the best journalist I’ve ever worked with, and we’re really lucky to have him as the producer of this project, but his journalism is without peer in this country, I think.’’
All of them have had formidable careers on either side of the camera.
‘‘It’s a really collaborative team, that’s what I love about it,’’ says Penfold.
‘‘I feel really lucky because I do feel as though the product is greater than the sum of its parts. None of us could do this work individually – it’s just too much work.’’
‘‘I think that’s the benefit of having four of us,’’ says Longbottom.
‘‘Because I’ve felt certainly at some points that I couldn’t see the wood from the trees, and when I couldn’t Paula could, and when Paula couldn’t Eugene could, or when Eugene couldn’t, Phil could.’’
Surprisingly, there’s no talk of a break following The Valley’s release – the team is anxious to address its backburner.
‘‘We’ve got other projects that we had on hold while we get this done,’’ hints Bingham. ‘‘So there’s a lot more that we want to get into, there’s more stories that need to be told.’’
‘‘There’s some cracking stories that need telling, actually,’’ Penfold says. ‘‘We can’t wait to get stuck into those.’’