Shah: says company would not be the same without Miller
Frostbite Productions, the awardwinning documentary company set up by the late James Miller and Saira Shah in 2001, is to close down.
Shah was making the film Death in Gaza with cameraman Miller in Rafah when he was killed by Israeli soldiers last May. She said the company “would not be the same without him”.
The film, made for the US-based HBO network, was shown at the Jerusalem Film Festival this week.
“[Frostbite] was James’s and my project and it would just be too sad really,” Shah told Press Gazette this week.
“It would have been great. It really was going to be great, but what can you do?” she added.
The company was named after longterm collaborators Shah and Miller suffered from frostbite while on an assignment in the Hindu Kush mountains of Afghanistan.
The two journalists made the RTS award-winning Beneath the Veil (with Hardcash Productions for Channel 4), which secretly filmed life for women under the Taliban, including executions in a football stadium. They also made the follow-up, Unholy War.
Shah said she was taking a break from television journalism, after a period of “absolute hell”, and was considering more writing. She is the author of The Storyteller’s Daughter: Return to a Lost Homeland, which chronicles her journeys to Afghanistan, where her father is from.
Investigations into Miller’s death are still ongoing, with calls from his family and broadcasters for a full criminal investigation.
By Wale Azeez
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