www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2tbjpANfW8

‘It has always seemed to me that what I write is about humanity in extremis, pushed to the unendurable, and that it is important to tell people what really happens in wars.’ Marie Colvin, 2001

Biographer Lindsey Hilsum will be joined by Henry Porter to discuss the life and work of Marie Colvin, one of the world’s most experienced foreign correspondents of our time.

Marie Colvin was glamorous, hard-drinking, braver than the boys, with a troubled and rackety personal life. With fierce compassion and honesty, she reported from the most dangerous places in the world, fractured by conflict and genocide, going in further and staying longer than anyone else.

In Sri Lanka in 2001, Marie was hit by a grenade and lost the sight in her left eye – resulting in her trademark eye patch – and in 2012 she was killed in Syria. Like her hero, the legendary reporter Martha Gellhorn, she sought to bear witness to the horrifying truths of war, to write ‘the first draft of history’ and crucially to shine a light on the suffering of ordinary people.

Written by fellow foreign correspondent Lindsey Hilsum, this is the story of the most daring war reporter of her generation. Drawing on unpublished diaries and notebooks, and interviews with Marie’s friends, family and colleagues, In Extremis is the story of our turbulent age, and the life of a woman who defied convention.

Lindsey Hilsum  is Channel 4 News International Editor, and has covered many of the conflicts of recent years including in Syria, Ukraine and the Arab Spring – sometimes alongside Marie Colvin. She was in Baghdad for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, and in Belgrade for the 1999 NATO bombing. In 1994, she was the only English-speaking correspondent in Rwanda when the genocide began. She has won awards from the Royal Television Society and BAFTA amongst others. Her last book, Sandstorm; Libya in the Time of Revolution, was described by the Observer as “an account with historical depth to match dramatic reportage.”

Henry Porter is a novelist and former commentator for the Observer. He is a winner of the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger award –  for Brandenburg, his novel about  the Fall of the Berlin wall,  which he covered in 1989. His latest book, Firefly, is the story of young boy on the migrant route in 2015 and is the first part of a trilogy set in the turbulent world of US and European politics. He was a friend of Marie’s and sat opposite her when they worked at the Sunday Times in the eighties. This was at a time when she was regularly picking up the phone to   Yasser Arafat and Muammar Gaddafi.

In HONDROS director and childhood friend Greg Campbell reveals a portrait of a man – Chris Hondros who found and explored humanity in war-torn countries with great depth and sensitivity. Hondros’ passion for his craft could only be matched by his unending talent for creating breathtaking imagery. Hondros is the 2017 documentary winner at Tribeca Film Festival.

Chris Hondros was an award-winning conflict photographer who covered nearly every major world of event of our time before he was killed covering the civil war in Libya on April 20, 2011. As a senior staff photographer for Getty images, Chris was frequently recognised by his peers for photographs that are examined in depth in HONDROS. Among the many awards and citations he earned for his work, Chris won the Overseas Press Club’s 2003 John Faber Award for his work in Liberia, the 2006 Robert Capa Gold Medal for his work in Iraq and he was a two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist.

Director: Greg Campbell  is a documentary filmmaker, journalist and bestselling nonfiction author making his directorial debut with the feature-length film HONDROS. Campbell is co-founder of Denver-based production company Fox Tale Films and the author of “Blood Diamonds; Tracing the Deadly Path of the World’s Most Precious Stones,” the book that inspired the Leonardo DiCaprio film BLOOD DIAMOND. As a journalist and filmmaker, Campbell has reported from around the world, including throughout Africa and the Middle East. He lives in Denver.

Executive Producer: Riva Marker is the Peabody Award-winning film producer and President of Nine Stories, the production company she launched with Jake Gyllenhaal in 2015. Prior to Nine Stories, Marker produced Cary Fukunaga’s BEASTS OF NO NATION, which won both SAG and Indie Spirit Awards for its star, Idris Elba; Michael Showalter’s comedy HELLO, MY NAME IS DORIS, starring Sally Field; and she was an executive producer on Lisa Cholodenko’s Academy Award-nominated THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT.

Run Time: 89 minutes

Post-screening will be joined by director Harold Monfils on Skype plus two journalists who feature in the film Jerome Starkey and Thomas Harding.

Directed by Harold Monfils

Running time: 87 mins.

Trailer: here

Read about Jason P. Howe’s life and work:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/health/11211285/War-photographer-Jason-Howes-battle-with-PTSD.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/i-fell-in-love-with-a-female-assassin-791978.html

How to Change the World chronicles the adventures of an eclectic group of young pioneers – Canadian hippie journalists, photographers, musicians, scientists, and American draft dodgers – who set out to stop Richard Nixon’s atomic bomb tests in Amchitka, Alaska, and end up creating the worldwide green movement.

Greenpeace was founded on tight knit, passionate friendships forged in Vancouver in the early 1970s. Together they pioneered a template for environmental activism which mixed daring iconic feats and engagement with worldwide media: placing small rubber inflatables between harpooners and whales; blocking ice-breaking sealing ships with their bodies; spraying the pelts of baby seals with dye to make them valueless in the fur market.

The group had a prescient understanding of the power of media, knowing that the advent of global mass communications meant that the image had become a more effective tool for change than the strike or the demonstration. But by the summer of 1977, Greenpeace Vancouver was suing Greenpeace San Francisco and the organisation had become a victim of its own anarchic roots, saddled with large debts and frequent in-fighting.

How To Change The World draws on interviews with the key players and hitherto unseen archive footage, which brings these extraordinary characters and their intense, sometimes eccentric and often dangerous world alive.

Directed by: Jerry Rothwell
Produced by: Al Morrow & Bous de Jong
Year: 2015
Running time: 110′

Explore, through her granddaughter’s eyes, the life story of Dorothea Lange, the photographer who captured the iconic image “Migrant Mother.” Never-seen-before photos, film footage, interviews, family memories, and journals reveal the artist who challenged America to know itself.

Lange’s enduring images document five turbulent decades of American history, including the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, World War II Japanese American Internment camps, and early environmentalism. Yet few know the story, struggles, and profound body of work of the woman behind the camera. Award winning cinematographer Dyanna Taylor, Lange’s granddaughter, directs and narrates this intimate documentary as it explores Lange’s life and probes her uncompromising vision.

Directed by: Dyanna Taylor
Country: United States
Year: 2015
Runtime: 60′

PBS America will be broadcasting DOROTHEA LANGE: GRAB A HUNK OF LIGHTNING here in the UK at 6.40pm on Friday 24 July on Sky 534 & Virgin Media 243

Regarding Susan Sontag is an intimate and nuanced investigation into the life of one of the most influential and provocative thinkers of the 20th century. Endlessly curious, passionate and gracefully outspoken throughout her career, Susan Sontag became one of the most important literary, political and feminist icons of her generation. This beautifully constructed documentary tracks Sontag’s life through evocative experimental images, archival materials, accounts from friends, family, and colleagues, as well as her own words as read by Patricia Clarkson.

From her early infatuation with books to her rise to celebrity; from her early marriage to her 15-year relationship with legendary photographer Annie Leibovitz, Regarding Susan Sontag is a fascinating look at a towering cultural critic and writer whose works on photography, war, illness, and terrorism continue to resonate today.

Directed by Nancy Kates
Duration: 59′
Year: 2014
Distributor: Women Make Movies

In April 1953, George Blake returned to Britain as a national hero, one of a small group of British diplomats who returned alive from three hard years as prisoner of the North Koreans. When the new Queen was crowned a couple of months later, he was among the select few invited to celebrate the day in No 2 Carlton Gardens, a discreet building overlooking the Mall from where the men who ran Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service were watching the royal procession. Little did they know that during his time as a prisoner he had become a Communist and decided to work for the KGB.

George Blake worked as a double agent for the Soviet Union until he was discovered in 1961 and sentenced to 42 years in prison. He escaped from Wormwood Scrubs prison in 1966 and fled to the USSR.

All traitors are complicated, but no one more so than Blake. In The Righteous Traitor, director George Carey speaks to Blake’s close acquaintances, historians and other former spies to chronicle his curious history. A close friend of his, Louis Wesserling, describes Blake: “He was a gambler…He spied to fill a void. It gave him a sense of enormous importance”. According to Tim Weiner, the famous historian of the CIA, “the revelation of Blake’s treachery did more damage to relations between Britain and America than all the Cambridge Five put together.”

Directed by George Carey
Duration: 90′
Year: 2015

Gore Vidal has had a profound effect on the worlds of literature, film, politics, historical debate, and the culture wars. Through fascinating archival footage from his legendary on-air career, as well as candid interviews and observational footage captured in his final years, director Nicholas Wrathall chronicles Vidal’s rich and multifaceted life.

Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia offers an engaging perspective of the turbulence of post-war America. With commentary by those who knew him best, including filmmaker/nephew Burr Steers and the late Christopher Hitchens, Wrathall explores the life and work of one of the most fearless critics of our time.

Directed by Nicholas Wrathall
Duration: 89′
Year: 2013

American director Thomas O’Connor weaves Greene’s 50 books and more than 100 of his stories adapted for television, theater and film into the story of his life: torn between good and evil; love and betrayal.

Narrated by Derek Jacobi and with excerpts read by Bill Nighy, Greene’s multi-faceted life is illustrated with historic footage as well as by rich interviews. Included are literary critics and authors such as David Lodge, Shirley Hazzard Paul Theroux and John Le Carre; former CIA Inspector General Frederick P. Hitz; bi-polar expert Dr. Kay Jamison; and the late Sir John Mortimer.

Directed by Thomas O’Connor 
Duration: 66′
Year: 2012