The International Refugee Crisis

Julia Ormond

Julia Ormond is the internationally acclaimed actress and activist who achieved stardom in a series of A-list films with such Hollywood leading men as Brad Pitt, Richard Gere, Sean Connery, and Harrison Ford. Fiercely devoted to the plight of international refugees, she has been lauded for her activism by renowned human-rights organizations, and continues to play a pivotal role in successfully lobbying for relief funding and other resources for displaced peoples.

In this dialogue Julia shares how her desire to protect and nurture human life has ultimately led her to extensive work with refugees around the world. In the mid-nineties she formed Indican Productions and produced Calling the Ghosts, a documentary about Bosnian women held in Serbian detention camps, which earned Julia an Emmy Award for Best Executive Producer. Calling the Ghosts was shown to the Council on Foreign Relations, Hillary Clinton, and Madeline Albright, among others, and was instrumental in allowing the laws to be changed that enabled indicted war criminal Slobodan Milosevic to be arrested. In 1999 she co-founded FilmAid International with Caroline Baron, Robert De Niro, Susan Sarandon, and Harvey Weinstein, an organization which seeks to use film as a powerful way to educate and uplift refugees.

"We were able to get Calling the Ghosts to the Council on Foreign Relations and it enabled a group of people in Washington to change the law which enabled Milosevic to be arrested...."

Julia and Ken discuss what an integral approach to humanitarian aid work might look like. Of primary importance is the need to take into account the social, cultural, and personal realities of the situation and the unique needs of each area. In the integral (AQAL) model these domains are represented by the four quadrants (I/We/It/Its). When working with any issue, it isn't that partial approaches are only moderately effective—they often hurt the overall situation. Whatever truth a particular approach may have, if it isn't supported in all four quadrants, that partial truth will eventually be rejected. For example, you can distribute condoms among a population to help control the spread of HIV/AIDS, but if a cultural stigma with using contraception isn't addressed, no one will use the condoms. Julia likens the integral approach to a colander, where each hole is an aspect of the larger problem that must be addressed. If you don't plug all the holes, the colander will never hold water and the problem will never be solved.

There are some 30 million refugees and displaced persons worldwide. In dealing with this crisis, what is often forgotten is that the average refugee is in a camp for ten years. In the long term, things like education, entertainment, and community-building activities are just as important as food, water, medicine, and shelter. Funding is often provided for exterior, material ways to alleviate human suffering, but the interior, subjective realities are largely ignored. In many ways FilmAid works to cover those interior realities. In addition to educating and entertaining the individual, sometimes up to 30,000 people in a community will gather to watch a film, which will become a springboard for conversation and debate. For any community to grow, social, cultural, and personal issues must be addressed at the same time if real change is going to occur. A refugee community is no different, and it's that kind of community that desperately needs the most help.

The international refugee crisis is as tragic a situation as any in the world today. Julia has proved her talent on the silver screen time and again, and we hope you enjoy the compassion and sizzling intelligence she brings to this most sensitive of issues....