Writer and reporter Eliza Griswold (The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, Farrar, Straus and Giroux) was in Karachi, Pakistan, conducting workshops sponsored by the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa when Osama bin Laden was killed and the country was thrown into turmoil. She was asked to report on the general feelings and fears of the Pakistani people for the Daily Beast. With brief appearances by novelists HM Naqvi and Joshua Ferris, this short documentary by Ram Devineni provides insights into the complexities of reporting on conflicts and the complexities of extrajudicial assassinations.

The documentary is an exclusive to Guernica Magazine and produced by Rattapallax in association with the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

 

Eliza Griswold
Eliza Griswold received a 2011 Anthony J. Lukas prize for her New York Times Bestselling Book The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam. She also received a 2010 Rome Prize from The American Academy in Rome for her poetry. Having won awards for both her nonfiction and her poems, she is currently a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, she reports on religion, conflict and human rights. Her first book of poems, Wideawake Field: Poems, was published in 2007 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and The Tenth Parallel, an examination of Christianity and Islam in Africa and Asia, also published by FSG, was released in the fall of 2010. Her reportage and poetry has appeared in the New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and The New Republic, among many others.

Ram Devineni
Ram Devineni is the editor and publisher of Rattapallax magazine and a filmmaker who is currently producing a documentary, The Human Tower, and a three-part travel documentary TV series called On the Road about endangered languages. He is one of the founding partners of Academia Internacional de Cinema, the first independent film school in Brazil.

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