It’s still hard to believe Sue Lloyd-Roberts is no longer with us. It’s still difficult to imagine that we won’t see her in another of her extraordinary films.
It wasn’t just the strong stories she told, but the way she told them. There was always, in some measure, her breathtaking bravery, her trademark tenacity.
One moment, she was a buyer of gems from Burma, in another looking to purchase rhinoceros horns in Vietnam, and then she even pretended to be buying a baby every day for a week in Romania.
Sue was on my mind a lot this year during my last trip before Christmas. I returned to the Syrian city of Homs at the moment when the place activists call “the capital of the revolution” returned to government hands with the last truce in the last rebel-held district. I kept remembering Sue’s film from Homs in 2011. Not surprisingly, she was the first journalist to go in undercover to film some of the first stirrings of protest.
Over the years, driving through Homs and being stopped at military checkpoints, I would sit in the car and recall how Sue had done it in disguise with a fake ID, pretending to be someone’s deaf-mute sister. I’ve always marvelled how, in so many places, she kept her nerve, kept calm and just kept going. She often worked alone, so when I watch her stories I’m always taken not just by her often exclusive images, but by questions about how she managed to film them herself when under fire, under scrutiny, under pressure.
Our mutual friend Ian O’Reilly, who worked with Sue over many years in many places, remarks how she was a campaigning journalist and one who, at times, “cried a lot“ when filming was done. And yet she reported within the parameters of a public broadcaster. Her anger simmered subtly in every story – a curt phrase, a sceptical look. Her script was restrained while still being revelatory. She upset many, including at times her colleagues, when she slipped in and out of their places, unnoticed until her films went to air. But she never veered from her determination to keep returning to the front lines of human rights abuses, wherever she saw them.
She returned again and again to countries such as Burma, Nepal, Romania and Zimbabwe. She returned again and again to issues such as female genital mutilation, honour killings, trafficking of every possible kind.
Sometimes at the BBC I would spot her sitting at a desk surrounded by her notebooks, her gaze fixed intensely on a screen. These were not the moments for interruption. At other times, when our paths crossed, her smile and warmth were immediate. There was that tantalising taste of her wicked sense of humour matched by an iron resolve to keep telling her stories, no matter what.
You caught just a glimpse of that Sue when she would appear in the TV or radio studio, after her return from another daunting trip, and another mammoth edit. There would be the brief tug of a lovely Sue smile before she solemnly introduced us to another terrible injustice. On occasion, that little love of mischief crept into her films. Her child-like exuberant dance with North Korean schoolchildren [in her 2010 dcoumentary Inside North Korea] was delightful.
On screen, she was a woman of crisp clean shirts. Off screen, I often found myself complimenting her on her swirling skirts, pretty patterns and, when the occasion called for it, the most elegant of evening attire.
Sue told so many stories without ever becoming the story. Her stories will never leave us.
