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July 6, 2014

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Difficult time in war-torn Afghanistan

TO help keep herself safe and sane while making television dramas in Afghanistan, Australian producer Trudi-Ann Tierney devised an ever-more elaborate game of hide-and-seek in her head in case the Taliban launched a surprise attack.

Imagining what it would be like to hide in the top of a wardrobe, the middle of a lake or buried among a herd of goats, she mentally weighed the pros and cons of them all, as she explains in her new book “Making Soapies in Kabul.”

A chain smoker who lived in the most polluted city on Earth, she endured typhoid, six types of stomach bugs and pneumonia during what she said was the most exhilarating experience of her life.

Tierney recently spoke about living and working in war-torn Afghanistan which led to her first book.

Q: What were you doing there?

A: My first job in television in Kabul was to write an eight-part drama serial for our Pashtun audience sponsored by a foreign embassy. It was to contain messages to counter narcotics. This concept of doing messaging through drama serials as opposed to a billboard was a very new idea in Afghanistan, where 86 percent of the country is illiterate.

Q: How does producing a TV series in Australia differ from Afghanistan?

A: In Australia you’ve got plenty of resources and experienced staff. In Afghanistan we had mainly untrained young people because television was banned for 10 years under the Taliban. The average age of our company was 24 years old.

Q: What were some of the hardships?

A: Intense heat, working through Ramadan and crews working strictly to rule. Initially I thought I could lead by example, I’d lug a beach umbrella and a makeup kit up a hill in 40-degree (104 F) heat. I coaxed, I wheedled, I joked, I jabbed ... and finally, I yelled! My crew stood waist deep in streams to get the best angles, trudged up mountains at 4am to film a sunrise. They were very young, enthusiastic, hard-working young people with a willingness to learn how to make television.

Q: Were you successful?

A: “Eagle Four” (our mission to portray the Afghan National Police as professional, hard-working and honest), was the biggest television drama production ever mounted in Afghanistan. We received an international award for this. Also, there was a spike in police recruitment during the course of “Eagle Four.”

Q: During long shoots, how did you pass the time?

A: One of my favorite games was “What would you do if the Taliban came now?” We would go to some location in the middle of nowhere, there’d be a bit of a mountain and a few trees and I’d literally think, “What would I do if the Taliban turned up?” You had to be inventive. It was something to pass the time but also something that stuck in the back of your mind.

My favorite was the bamboo stick and I honestly believed that could work. You’d get under the water and use the stick as a snorkel. The only trouble was I wouldn’t know when the Taliban had left and I could be under the water for hours and get bitten by a fish — that was the only setback.




 

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