The sides of the vans are marked with what looks like gaffer's tape: "TV TV TV." It's a makeshift appeal to a rapidly disappearing tradition: not targeting press in a war zone. In Baghdad, all bets are off.
No one is more aware of this life-threatening shift to targeting journalists than the five principals in Bearing Witness. Taken together, they have covered conflicts in every hotspot you could name, as well as many that you can't, despite their best efforts to bear witness: Ivory Coast, Chechnya, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Congo, Sri Lanka, and now Iraq. For one year, from the initial U.S. invasion in April 2003 to the burgeoning quagmire in April 2004, director Barbara Kopple followed these extraordinary women as they covered the war in Iraq for news outlets ranging from CNN to Al-Jezeerah. It offers a rare glimpse into the gritty reality of the lives of female foreign correspondents. As Marie Colvin of the Sunday Times of London wryly observes, it's not like the movies, where foreign correspondents are "all good looking, and they have a lot of sex." Far from it.
Cribbing from the Tribeca program notes:
May Ying Welsh, a producer at Al Jazeera TV and self-described 'American in love with Baghdad' experiences the bombing of her hotel during the course of this documentary. A camerawoman for CNN, Mary Rogers, recounts covering an uprising in Sierra Leone that ended with her being in the middle of gun battle and her colleagues being killed in an ambush only days later. Then there's Molly Bingham, a photographer who went from covering the war in Iraq, to becoming the story when she was arrested and locked in the city's infamous Abu Ghraib prison. But perhaps Marie Colvin, senior foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, has suffered the most personal injury of the quintet because her wound is so evident: the eye-patch wearing Colvin shares how she nearly died from a grenade attack that resulted in the loss of an eye. Finally, Janine DiGiovanni, a foreign correspondent for UK's The Times, who juggles an international courtship that blossoms into marriage, faces a whole new quandary: Can a pregnant reporter really cover a war?
Now, I know I already hyped this film, but I really enjoyed it. Bearing Witness next plays at the Tribeca Film Festival on Tuesday, April 26; Wednesday, April 27; and Saturday, April 30. Or you can catch it at Hotdocs in Toronto on April 28 and 29.
