Buffett Q&A: The Yemeni Women Fighting to Preserve Their Heritage with Brent Huffman, Buffett Faculty Fellow
For this installment of our Buffett Q&A series profiling faculty and scholars in the Roberta Buffett Institute community, we spoke with Brent Huffman, Professor and Director of Documentary Journalism at the Medill School as well as a 2025–26 Buffett Faculty Fellow. In his forthcoming documentary Written in Stone, he follows four Yemeni women working to protect their country's heritage from war, climate change, and looting through education and archeology.
What is the focus and inspiration of your work?
My work is grounded in human rights and social justice, and in recent years it has centered on communities working to preserve their own cultural heritage against the threats of war, climate change, and looting. My current documentary examines Yemeni women who, in many cases, are risking their lives to protect the cultural heritage of their country.
I am inspired above all by the people carrying out this work, often against overwhelming odds. Many are local women operating with little funding or institutional support, laboring against civil war, corruption, and looting to preserve their own history. I want to demonstrate that these are individuals with rich and complex lives, and that the country possesses a wealth of world heritage largely unknown to outside audiences.
What is the central question at the heart of the film?
It helps to begin with my previous film, which followed Afghan archaeologists working to save a 5,000-year-old Buddhist city that a mining company intended to demolish to extract the copper beneath it. Through that project, I became preoccupied with the idea of communities risking everything to preserve their own heritage, which I understand as inseparable from their identity. When a people's history is destroyed or erased, a fundamental part of their identity is lost with it.
I encountered that same dynamic in Yemen, where the risk is arguably greater because it arises from several directions at once: armed conflict, severe climate change, looting, and corruption. The film is therefore less concerned with answering a single question than with reintroducing this country, its people, and the threats they confront. At its core, it asks what is lost when a people's history disappears, and what it means that a small number of women are determined to prevent that loss.
How did you discover this story?
In 2023, UNESCO identified Yemen as perhaps the country whose cultural heritage faced the greatest risk. Yemen contains five UNESCO World Heritage sites and several more under consideration, and UNESCO issued a formal warning that this heritage was gravely endangered. That warning underscored the urgency of documenting both the work and the heritage itself before either might be lost.
At the same time, I encountered accounts of women leading these preservation efforts, and I was drawn to a story defined by their leadership: women working to preserve some of the earliest known Islamic manuscripts, the temple associated with the Queen of Sheba, and caverns containing mummies as ancient as those of Egypt. This is an extraordinary body of world heritage that Western audiences have rarely, if ever, encountered.
How did the Buffett Faculty Fellowship Program facilitate your work on this documentary?
The fellowship enabled me to continue filming within Yemen. A portion of the funding supported work in the old city of Sanaa, where one of my subjects, an architect, is restoring historic residential buildings. I also used it to convene a cultural heritage conference on World Heritage Day in the ancient city of Taiz.
The conference brought the women featured in the film together for the first time. Though they share a common purpose, they had never met, gathered, or presented their work publicly. In Taiz, they presented to an audience of local residents, heritage specialists, nonprofit and government representatives, and journalists. Beyond documenting the event, my aim was to support these women directly: to amplify their voices and strengthen their confidence in presenting their work to a broader public.
Why is the preservation of Yemeni cultural heritage an especially urgent issue today?
Because the threats are immediate and ongoing. Yemen has endured more than 12 years of civil war, during which heritage sites are continually damaged or destroyed. Climate change compounds the danger. Coastal erosion threatens heritage along the shoreline, while inland regions face extreme drought and heat in some areas and severe flooding in others. Looting, meanwhile, is steadily depleting the country's material culture.
The urgency is therefore twofold. The first aim is to correct entrenched stereotypes and demonstrate that Yemen is far more than a site of war and famine, with a great deal at stake that the world ought to recognize. The second is to honor the initiative of these women, who are working to preserve their heritage against considerable odds.
Who are the Yemeni women tackling this urgent issue?
One of the film's central subjects, Reem, is an archaeologist who lost her husband and both of her parents during the war. Despite that loss, she is a remarkably resilient and joyful person. In the film, she volunteers as a teacher for young refugee children who have fled other regions of Yemen, instructing them about cultural heritage sites that many have never encountered, even though they live in the country.
During one lesson, she shows the children printed images of a site and announces that they will visit it in person the following day. Their excitement is immediate and overwhelming; several are moved to tears, and many have never been on a field trip before. When they arrive, the children rush toward the site, eager to touch everything, pressing their hands against ancient handprints to compare them with their own. The excursion cost roughly fifteen dollars, and it nearly did not take place.
That scene distills the entire film. Many of these children do not initially recognize this heritage as their own, and in coming to understand that it is, they gain something they can take pride in: an affirmation of what it means to be Yemeni. History confers a sense of confidence, stakes, and purpose. That is precisely what the women in the film are cultivating in the next generation: the understanding that this heritage belongs to them, and that protecting it matters.