Yerevan/Mediamax/. Legendary American journalist and documentary film maker Jon Alpert conducted a master class for Mediamax’s journalists in Yerevan on October 17.

A winner of several Emmy Awards, Jon Alpert, who had visited numerous hotspots on the globe and interviewed Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein during his 40-year career path, spoke about his life demonstrating fragments from his documentaries and answered the journalists’ questions.

“I don’t have a journalism degree. I started my career in New York, worked as a taxi driver for 2 years and one of my first films was one about a taxi”, the TV reporter recalls.

“Iraq was one of my greatest shocks as I saw soldiers having arm and leg amputations several times in the U.S. hospital in Iraq over a few days”, Jon Alpert said. As a result of his stay in Iraq, he shot “Baghdad Emergency Room” which won 4 Emmy Awards.

Jon Alpert was an Oscar nominee for one of his recent films, China's Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province. The film features the situation in the Chinese Sichuan province which was greatly damaged after the destructive earthquake in 2008. The reporter managed to show the protest actions and convey the grief of parents who had lost their children as the majority of the schools in the province were destroyed whereas other neighboring buildings were undamaged. As Jon Alpert shows in his film, this resulted from low-quality materials used for building the schools. Due to this film, the TV reporter was declared a persona non grata in China.

“Yes, I had to break the law more than once to shoot my films. I think if I didn’t do that I wouldn’t manage to shoot the majority of my films, those about China in particular”, confessed the reporter.

Jon Alpert has long been the only American journalist to have had the opportunity to visit Cuba and meet with Fidel Castro.

“Once I spent a whole week with Fidel. I would talk to him about politics, fishing and cigars, many different things”, the reporter recalls showing some frames with legendary Comandante while sipping beer, smoking cigars, speaking at the UN and writing an explanatory note to his daughter’s teacher for missing the lessons at school.

Is it difficult to work as an independent journalist, as Alpert, in the U.S? “I was twice blacklisted, for my report on the Gulf War including. But the situation has changed and now the military servicemen like me”, jokes Jon Alpert.

Jon Alpert arrived in Armenia on the invitation of Alternative Resources in Media project headed by Manana Aslamazyan who has long been the head of Internews in Russia and made a significant contribution to the development of regional TV in Russia.