BANDA, INDIA (AFP) – An all-women team of smartphone-toting, low-caste reporters who chronicle India’s hardscrabble heartland may give the cinema-mad country its first Oscar-winning film, after their own story became a critically lauded documentary.

The journalists of Khabar Lahariya (Waves of News) have built a huge following across Uttar Pradesh, a northern state with more people than Brazil, covering a beat that runs from cow thefts to sexual violence and corruption.

They have earned the respect of their village communities by covering local stories often overlooked by India’s established media outlets, but only after a relentless battle to be taken seriously by authorities – and even their own families.

“Just stepping outside the household was a big challenge… I had to fight many battles,” reporter Geeta Devi told AFP.

“Even my father was dead against me. He said, ‘You can’t do this work, this is not something that women are supposed to do.'”

As with her colleagues, Devi is a member of the Dalit community, the lowest rung in India’s rigid caste system and the victims of an entrenched culture of prejudice and humiliation.

In Banda, a riverside town a few hours’ drive from the Taj Mahal, Devi interviewed a woman rendered destitute after she was abandoned by her husband.

But as word got around that a Khabar Lahariya reporter was nearby, others approached her to implore coverage of their own woes – municipal neglect leading to a lack of clean drinking water and dirty, overflowing drains.

Some women took her aside to privately share their stories as victims of sexual harassment and violence – issues often hushed up under the weight of small-town stigma.

Formal discrimination against Dalits was abolished a long time ago, but they are still often barred from entering temples or houses belonging to higher castes, and remain targets of violence.

As members of a marginalised community and women in the deeply patriarchal villages of India’s Hindi-speaking heartland, Khabar Lahariya’s correspondents have a unique insight into local affairs, and Devi said she is proud to be part of a team working with a “feminist lens”.

Their endeavours are the subject of Writing with Fire, an Oscar-nominated documentary that has taken the film festival circuit by storm and already won the Special Jury Award at Sundance.

The fly-on-the-wall narrative shows dedicated journalists preparing to transition from their legacy newspaper operations to digital production, unbowed by their encounters with dismissive police and fearsome local strongmen.

“It’s a very inspiring story. It’s a story about women who give hope,” the film’s director Rintu Thomas told AFP at an Academy Awards preview event in Los Angeles.

“I think that is very strong and powerful, especially in the world that we are in right now where there is so much mistrust of the media,” she added.

India is home to the world’s most prolific film industry and cinema holds a rarefied place in national culture, with stars enjoying almost divine status and people often queuing to watch the same movie multiple times.

But no Indian-produced film or documentary has ever won an Academy Award, despite locally shot foreign productions Gandhi and Slumdog Millionaire each winning Best Picture in years past. Parts of India have prospered in the three decades since market reforms brought a jolting end to decades of sclerotic, socialist-inspired central planning.

Khabar Lahariya works in areas left behind by the economic boom, where life has barely changed even as new wealth transforms the country’s urban landscape and culture.

The outlet’s managing editor Meera Devi said her work is driven by a passion for giving a voice to those left out of India’s success story.

“When I fight for the rights of the minorities, tribals and other marginalised sections of society – when these people get heard and get justice, I feel very good,” she said.

Born in a remote village and married at 14, Meera had to fight against the odds to get a college degree. The 35-year-old joined the media house in 2006, soon after it began publishing, initially working on stories of cattle theft and tragic family disputes before moving on to local politics.

Her work has sent crooks to jail and shamed officials into ordering the repair of rundown roads, as well as charting the rising tide of Hindu nationalism in the country’s rural hinterlands.

“The men here are not used to seeing powerful women, especially in a field like journalism. But we are changing that outlook,” she said.

“We have proven that if women are given the right opportunities, we can achieve anything.

Once you give women the freedom they deserve, you simply cannot stop them.”

BOCHENIEC, POLAND (AP) – Twenty-two-month-old Yeva Vakulenko had been through four rounds of chemotherapy for leukemia at a hospital in Ukraine, and then suffered a relapse. As she began returning again for more treatment, Russia invaded, disrupting doctors’ efforts to cure her.

Air raids forced the toddler to shelter in the basement of the hospital in the western city of Lviv for hours at a time, making her feel even worse. She cried a lot and sought comfort from her grandmother, who is caring for her after her parents were in an accident that left her mother disabled with brain and leg injuries.

So when doctors told Yeva’s grandmother that they could evacuate to Poland, she seized the chance.

“It is very difficult for children to go somewhere in the middle of the night and sit in the basement for a long time,” said Nadia Kryminec as she held her granddaughter, whose sweet-natured smiles gave no hint of the ordeal she has endured.

“We were told that she was in stable condition and we should try to go. Otherwise, she is simply doomed to death,” the grandmother said.

The little girl, who her grandmother said understands everything, is one of more than 400 Ukrainian children with cancer who have been evacuated to a clinic in Poland. Doctors then place them in one of some 200 hospitals in 28 countries.

“We triage the patients when they arrive at our centre,” said Dr Marcin Włodarski, a paediatric haematologist at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, who is staffing the Unicorn Clinic of Marian Wilemski in Bocheniec, in central Poland.

Stable patients are transferred quickly from there to hospitals in other countries while those in worse condition are first stabilised in Polish hospitals, he said.

“Then they return to us and can be sent for further travel,” Włodarski said.

Decisions have to be made fast because time is critical for the young oncology patients.

The evacuations began immediately after Russia attacked Ukraine on February 24, and is a joint effort of St Jude, the Polish Society of Paediatric Oncology and Haematology, Poland’s Fundacja Herosi (Heroes Foundation), and Tabletochki, a Ukrainian charity that advocates for children with cancer.

Dr Marta Salek, another paediatric haematologist oncologist with St Jude who is staffing the Polish clinic, said the centre receives large numbers of patients and convoys that arrive from Lviv through humanitarian corridors.

“At times we can have convoys with only 20-something patients but we can have up to 70 patients at a time and even more,” she said.

At the clinic, a large bin of white unicorn stuffed animals sits in a room, along with a wooden train set, brightly coloured balloons and other toys that the children happily play with.

More than three million people – about half of them children – have fled Ukraine as the country faces a brutal military onslaught by Russian forces that has targetted civilians. Of those, more than two million people have arrived in Poland, the largest of Ukraine’s neighbours to its west. A Polish health ministry official said on Friday that the country is treating 1,500 refugees in hospitals, many of whom are suffering hypothermia after their journey, and 840 of whom are children.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Friday that cancer is one of the major health challenges resulting from the war. It said it was supporting the effort by the organisations that “are working against the clock to reconnect paediatric cancer patients with their treatments”.

“Cancer itself is a problem, but treatment interruptions, stress and risk of infection mean that hundreds of children might die prematurely,” said Dr Roman Kizyma, head of the Western Ukrainian Specialised Children’s Medical Centre in Lviv, where the paediatric oncology patients are first stabilised before they are sent across the border into Poland.

“We believe that these are the indirect victims of this war,” Kizyma said in a WHO statement.

Among those at the clinic this week was Anna Riabiko, from Poltava, Ukraine, who was seeking treatment for her daughter Lubov, who has neuroblastoma.

“Treatment is currently impossible in Ukraine. Fighting is taking place, there are no doctors, it is impossible to have surgery or chemotherapy. And even maintenance therapy is also impossible to obtain,” she said. “So we had to look for salvation somewhere.”

It’s not a step that all parents were able to take for their sick children, she said.

“A lot of sick children stayed there,” she said. “Because parents were worried and did not want to go into the unknown.”