When she woke up in Baghdad one morning in April, Canadian journalist Tara Sutton didn't know that by nightfall she'd be the lone Westerner shooting footage in the besieged city of Fallujah and sending those pictures out to the world.
Falluja, Burial Ground of the Americans, the film that Sutton shot in Fallujah -- shown on CBC Television and around the world -- was nominated last week in London for a Rory Peck Award, which honours freelance television news-gatherers. Sutton was also nominated for a longer feature, Falluja Experience, that she made with fellow journalist Marc Perkins.
She didn't win in either category, but that won't be too much of a deterrent: She's currently editing a new documentary about Fallujah, and she's signed on as a consultant to a new BBC series about the U.S. battle to take the Iraqi city.
"I'm generally pretty cautious," says the 34-year-old Sutton, who was raised partly in Toronto and carries a Canadian passport. Over a glass of wine in London last week, she described the odd sensation of being at the BBC and seeing new pictures of Fallujah, a city she knew well, under attack.
The decision to go to Fallujah in the spring during a lull in fighting was made on "gut instinct." She drove to the city from Baghdad with The Observer's Patrick Graham, a fellow Canadian, and their guide, a native of the city.
They were stopped on the outskirts by U.S. Marines, and trapped in a long line of traffic -- all people who had heard the fighting had stopped and wanted to get back into the city.
Sutton, dressed like a native Iraqi in veil and gown, simply slipped past the soldiers and walked into the city with her companions.
"And it was completely deserted, very eerie," she says. They wandered the city, empty but for the insurgents and some regular citizens who couldn't or wouldn't go. They came across a mass burial site in the city's soccer stadium. "That was one of the worst things I've ever seen," says Sutton, who filmed the carnage. They visited a makeshift hospital and interviewed a doctor who said, "You wouldn't operate on a dog in the conditions we have here."
The next morning, they slipped out again, and Sutton spent the day frantically editing her tape and writing a script to send to a news-hungry world. "I can't believe I did that much in two days," she says. "I mean, there are days when I can barely buy a newspaper."
What makes Sutton's story evenmore daring is that she is one of a growing number of freelance videographers operating in the Middle East, who are increasingly called on by Western media outlets unwilling or unable to send their own crews. The freelancers are usually self-funded, often have no insurance, and no corporate big brother to back them up if they're captured or injured.
Sutton, who was born in Belgium, grew up around the world, the child of a Canadian mother and father who worked in banking. Part of her childhood was spent in Saudi Arabia, "where I was turned off the Muslim world, mainly because of the treatment of women." That feeling changed when she arrived in Baghdad, "sneaking in" with the humanitarian group War Child in 2003. "Iraq was so much more secular, and the people were so great. They were about to be invaded by the West, but a taxi driver would say, 'No, you can't pay, you're a guest.' "
Sutton, who still keeps a room in Baghdad, spent a month in Fallujah in late 2003 making a documentary about the roots of the insurgency.
"Seeing things blow up and people being shot has never been what's interested me. The human story is always what I've been interested in." She smiles brightly. "Maybe I don't have the balls."
That is a typical observation: Sutton is wry and un-macho about her calling. She admits to being frightened and horrified by things she's seen. "I was scared," she says, "and I was freelance, and everybody else seemed terribly prepared. I had 500 bucks and a camera."
Tina Carr, the director of the Rory Peck Trust, calls Sutton "extraordinarily brave." Carr says there has been an "unprecedented" rise in the use of freelance camera people recently, mainly due to the war in Iraq. Many of those camera people are multipurpose free agents, like Sutton, who work on their own, shooting, writing and editing their reports. "It is very dangerous," says Carr. "And it's more dangerous now because of the changes in technology. They can file from the heat of the action . . . there doesn't seem to be any place to rest."
According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 55 photographers or camera operators were killed in the past decade. The Rory Peck Trust is named for a cameraman shot in Moscow in 1993.
One of the award-winners last week was James Miller, a cameraman-director who made the 90-minute film Death in Gaza in partnership with Saira Shah. Miller was shot dead in Gaza last year while making the documentary, which examines the lives of Israeli and Palestinian children growing up in the shadow of violence.
Speaking before the awards, Sutton seemed not to mind that she would likely lose to Miller. "It's an amazing documentary," she said. "Everyone should see it."