The film is due to be playing in cinemas 11-12 November.

In response to transatlantic events, the Frontline Club and Byline Festival with FFR are coming to New York to launch a US version of their unique festival for independent journalism and free speech. This will be the opening night, a full itinerary of events will be happening on 7th November at the Edition Hotel New York. To book tickets for the 7th November click here.

Programme

Monday 6th November

7pm – Screening of MOSUL at the Bronx Documentary Center

7.30pm – 8.30pm Q&A with film director Olivier Sarbil hosted by Marcia Biggs

8pm – Late drinks reception

The craft of drawing has an important role to play in shining a spotlight on the people and places left unseen.

Artist and journalist Molly Crabapple joined an audience at the Frontline Club on Wednesday 6 April to discuss the unique purpose of her art in uncovering injustice and activism around the world. She also held a book signing session for her recently released memoir Drawing Blood, a colourful mix of autobiographical writing and illustrations.

How to draw censorship, how to draw the unseen? Great talk by @mollycrabapple at @FrontlineClub

— Veronique Mistiaen (@VeroMistiaen) April 6, 2016

Starting out as a model and artist in the sex industry, Crabapple has gone on to draw and report from Guantanamo Bay, Syria, the West Bank, Iraqi Kurdistan, and became a crucial voice during New York’s Occupy Movement in 2011. Long-time friend and journalist Natasha Lennard joined Crabapple to chair the discussion, describing her as “a crucial voice of our time, in a moment when journalism is in flux and open for necessary experimentation.” Lennard began by asking her motivations for using art for journalistic purposes.

“Photojournalists, they went into the world and captured everything, captured a story, they captured all these people and all these places,” Crabapple replied. “And I thought, my god, we artists used to do that before the camera came. The camera stole the image-making power from us. And I wanted to do that too.”

Her first assignment as a journalist was in 2013, when she visited Guantanamo Bay to document the detention centre and its inmates. Later that year, she was shortlisted for a Frontline Award for her stark portrayal of the prison, and the anonymous figures locked within its walls.

By Molly Crabapple

“Guantanamo is the most visually censored place on earth,” she explained. “Guantanamo is a place that if you were a photographer, your camera would be rifled through by a soldier at the end of every single session. But… I was able to draw Guantanamo Bay in a way that a photographer cannot photograph it. Not only that, but to draw the censorship itself. To make it explicit.”

Continuing on the theme of censorship, the duo turned to Crabapple‘s work with a Syrian journalist in Raqqa in 2015. She created a series of illustrations from photographs sent from Syria for Vanity Fair showing daily life under ISIS rule, areas too dangerous for most photojournalists to access.

“One of the projects that I’m proudest of was this project I did with a young Syrian writer named Marwan Hisham,” Crabapple elaborated. “I wanted to take images of daily life from ISIS-held territory and not the usual gory images of severed heads that we see on the news. Images of children going through the trash trying to find something to sell, or images of families on breadlines. Images of just daily prosaic life there. I wanted to, with my own skills as an artist, imbue them with craft and all the attention and time that a photojournalist would normally view something with.”

By Molly Crabapple

One audience member asked, given the traumatic and sometimes horrifying nature of the material she was dealing with, how drawing Syria had affected her.

Crabapple replied: “I am completely in awe of courage, of Syrian journalists working in the field, and the intense risks that they take… No one even cares if they die. It’s staggering and I feel a sense of shame. That’s how it transforms me, it gives me a sense of shame because in many ways my collaborators are better than me.”

Throughout the evening, many people in the audience expressed gratitude to Crabapple for her work, adding that it encouraged them to explore politics, human vulnerability and activism through art. After thanking her, one audience member asked Crabapple how she would imagine an ideal world.

“I think we are facing a fundamental challenge to the idea of borders,” Crabapple responded. “I think with the internet and the way people interact globally, that the way people are chained if they have ‘poor-world passports’, despite these global interactions that they have… I think that cannot stand. The ‘First World’ is going to have a choice– to either be part of the rest of the world, which they’ve often been exploiting… or they can engage in massive violence to keep the rest of the world out. I fear very desperately that they’re going to choose the second. But a small step toward making the world better might be them choosing the first.”

“Jan Gehl might be the most famous architect that you’ve never heard of,” filmmaker Andreas Dalsgaard told a sold-out Frontline Club audience Tuesday evening 20 August, where he screened his latest project: The Human Scale.

The movie explores Gehl’s innovation in architecture and city planning over the last several decades, from his native Copenhagen to Chongqing, Dhaka, New York and Los Angeles, to name only a few places.  His re-shaping of urban life aims to accommodate the billions of people pouring into cities worldwide, yet just as importantly, to nurture the community, intimacy, spontaneity and local culture that he sees human nature craving.

Andreas M. Dalsgaard. Photo: Jim Treadway

In both the film and Q & A with Dalsgaard that followed, the contrast between the traditional modernist cities built in the 20th century and Gehl’s own re-conception of them was highlighted.

Traditional modernism, practiced by planners like New York’s Robert Moses and Paris’s Le Corbusier, featured high-rise buildings whose construction often razed old neighbourhoods, callously neglecting to regenerate the sense of community that they fostered.  Vehicle traffic was accommodated above all while pedestrian life, with the vitality and social fabric it created, began to fade.

Gehl, by contrast, has emphasised sensuousness and intimacy, reorienting spaces to bring people into the street where they are offered “little invitations” – to sit, walk, cycle, and engage in social and commercial activity that fits with local culture.

Much of his inspiration came from cities of centuries past: “we always did the old cities in 5 km/hr scale,” he says.  “That means that when you move at 5km/hr – walking – people are sort of squeezed a little bit together.  And it’s a very sensual and interesting world.  You can see all the details and colours, smells and acoustics.”

Dalsgaard particularly appreciated the sensitivity in Gehl’s approach:

“That to me is maybe the most interesting thing . . . they have the humble approach of going in and trying to understand the local context, understand how they work . . . and from there on, they try to find solutions.  And then afterwards, after things have been done, they also do post-evaluations, to understand:  did it actually work?  How did people use this space?  And I think it’s becoming something more and more common in architecture to actually do these things.  And not just build it and then it’s there, and ‘it’s a “piece of art” according to the architect, and everyone has to be happy.”

Above: Dalsgaard with Documentary Programmer Wotienke Vermeer; Dalsgaard introducing the screening

Dalsgaard continued:

“You can’t copy-paste [between cities] and you shouldn’t . . . . Because Scandinavia and Copenhagen is such a unique society model that is so hard to copy, because it’s so connected to culture and hundreds of years of societal development.  Like you can’t take democracy and just put it into Egypt and think everything’s going to be fine.  So the idea that you can just put a bike lane up in New York, or Dallas, Texas, and people are just going to happily jump on their bike – I don’t think it’s so easy.  Because there’s so many different layers and factors and things that have to work together.”

More information about The Human Scale can be found here, view the trailer:
[vimeo clip_id=”67638874″ width=”400″ height=”225″]

See Jan Gehl’s books here:  Cities for People and Life Between Buildings

On April 5, 2011 South African freelance photographer Anton Hammerl went missing after coming under fire from Gaddafi loyalists. For 44 days his family was told repeatedly by the Libyan regime that he was alive and well. The truth is he was left to die in the desert. A campaign is currently underway to locate and recover his remains.

Antib Hammerl in Brega. Photo credit: Unaj Aranzadi.

2011 was one of the worst years for photojournalism with 3 deaths in addition to Anton’s, followed by yet another in 2012. Besides raising funds for Anton’s 11, 8 and 1 year-old children the evening aims to highlight the sacrifices made by photographers – particularly freelancers – who assume great risks to bring back images to agencies, magazines, publishers and readers worldwide, often with little backup.

Signed prints by some of the world’s leading photographers – including Sebastiao Salgado, Alec Soth, Christopher Anderson, Ed Kashi, Yuri Kozyrev, Larry Fink, Lynsey Addario, Susan Meiselas, Ron Haviv, David Burnett, Joao Silva, Bruce Davidson, Greg Marinovich, Samuel Aranda, Roger Ballen and Vincent Laforet – will be auctioned off by Christie’s Senior Vice President Lydia Fenet.

"The upcoming ‘Friends of Anton’ auction at Christie’s is a milestone in contemporary photojournalism", says New York-based collector Alan L. Paris, "As a collector of photojournalism, I am particularly excited because this is the first ever auction dedicated to contemporary photojournalism. The contributors are top notch, the photos are of the highest quality, the material is fresh to the marketplace, and it is all for a very good cause."

• Christie’s is located at 20 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10020.
• Auction: 6:30pm, May 15th, 2012.
• 501c(3) Reporters Without Borders is the fiscal sponsor of this all-volunteer evening, which is made possible by the generous assistance of Christie’s, Innovative Philanthropy and Edelman. 

By Nicole Hunt

The two men charged with the April 2010 murder of South African white supremacist leader Eugene Terre’Blanche go on trial in Ventersdorp on Monday. Chris Mahlangu and an unnamed teenager are accused of killing the leader of the Afrikaner Weerstasbeweging (AWB) party over a wage dispute.

EU Foreign Ministers meet in Luxembourg, with Syria expected to be on the agenda after a UN Security Council resolution condemning Syria was vetoed by Russia and China last week and Syrian opposition members officially formed a National Council.

Liberians go to the polls on Tuesday to elect their president for the next six years. Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who became Africa’s first female leader when she was elected in 2005, is hoping to win a second term.

A verdict is expected in the corruption trial for Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko in Kiev, who is accused of ‘misspending’ some $280m during her time as Prime Minister.

In New York City, alleged Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout’s trial for selling weapons to Colombian rebel group FARC gets underway.

The European Commission presents its 2011 enlargement package in Brussels on Wednesday, which includes a formal favourable opinion on Croatia’s accession and a much-awaited opinion on Serbian accession following the arrest earlier this year of alleged war criminals Ratko Mladic and Goran Hadzic.

The European Central Bank, the Bank of England, the Swiss National Bank and the Bank of Japan hold the first of three unlimited US dollar auctions, which were announced last month and are designed to flood the financial market with dollars to support banks through the EU debt crisis. Two more auctions are planned for 9 November and 7 December.

On Thursday, Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara pays his first visit to the country’s troubled western region since taking power in May following months of post-election violence and a power struggle with former President Laurent Gbagbo. Violence has continued in the west, where suspected Gbagbo loyalists are thought to be conducting armed raids over the Liberian border.

In France, journalist Tristine Banon publishes her book Le Bal des hypocrites, detailing her accusations of attempted rape against former IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors begin a two day meeting in Paris on Friday, with the EU debt crisis expected to be high on the agenda.

In Dublin, the OECD publishes its latest Economic Survey of Ireland. The last edition was published in 2009, so there should be plenty of new material given the country’s economic woes in the interim.

The Chinese Communist Party’s Central Committee begins its annual gathering on Saturday. The meeting is seen as a key part of the power handover that should see Xi Jinping replace Hu Jintao as President next October.

Elections are held in Oman to name the 83 members of the country’s lower house of parliament, the Majlis al Shura, a consultative assembly which was granted legislative and regulatory powers in March as the Arab Spring spread across the region. The upper house is still appointed by the monarchy.

France’s Socialist Party holds the second round of voting in its presidential primaries on Sunday, choosing the person who will go up against Nicolas Sarkozy in the 22 April presidential election. Dominique Strauss-Kahn had been a favourite to win the party’s candidacy before he was charged with sexual assault in May; despite the charges being dropped, he opted not to run.

It’s also Blog Action Day, which encourages bloggers worldwide to post about the same topic in hopes of driving collective action and sparking global discussion. This year’s theme is food, with the date chosen to coincide with World Food Day. Around 5,600 bloggers from 143 countries participated in last year’s event, which focused on water.

We will be discussing the "War on Terror" that was waged in the wake of 9/11, the impact of a global battle characterised in terms of "good vs. evil": and asking if it is a war that can ever be won. What has been the impact of both the reality and rhetoric on an increasingly interconnected world? The panel will also be taking stock of the seismic events the world has witnessed in the past decade.

Paddy O’Connell of BBC Radio 4’s Broadcasting House who was living and working in New York on 9/11 and anchored the New York end of the special programme that night for BBC One. Twitter: @paddy_o_c

With:

Mehdi Hasan, senior editor (politics) at the New Statesman and a former Channel 4 news and current affairs editor, co-author of Ed: the Milibands and the Making of a Labour Leader and author of the new ebook The Debt Delusion.  Twitter:@ns_mehdihasan

Carne Ross, a former British diplomat, author and journalist. Having resigned from the British foreign service after giving secret testimony to an official inquiry into the Iraq war, he then set up the world’first independent diplomatic advisory group, Independent Diplomat, which advises marginalised countries and groups around the world.  He is author of The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power And Change Politics in the 21st Century. Twitter: @carneross

Maajid Nawaz, co-Founder and executive director of Quilliam and founder of Khudi,  and Founder of Khudi, he was formerly on the UK national leadership for the global Islamist party Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT). During his 14 years with HT he was a founding member of its Denmark and Pakistan operations. During a four year sentence in an Egyptian prison he renounced Islamist ideology while remaining Muslim. He now engages in counter-Islamist thought-generating, social-activism, writing, debating and media appearances. Twitter:@MaajidNawaz

Michael Goldfarb, author, journalist, broadcaster and GlobalPost’s London correspondent. Goldfarb has covered conflicts and conflict resolution in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, the Middle East and Latin America for NPR and the BBC. He covered the war in Iraq as an unembedded reporter based in Kurdistan. His book on the conflict, Ahmad’s War, Ahmad’s Peace: Surviving Under Saddam, Dying in the New Iraq was named one of The New York Times‘ Notable Books of 2005. On September 11, 2001 he was live on the air from 10 until noon in the US presenting part of NPR’s coverage and since then has reported extensively on radical Islam from Cairo and Tehran to the streets of London. Twitter: @MGEmancipation

Book tickets here. 

The decision to go into Afghanistan was necessary as a kind of “acting out” to restore American national confidence and pride in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 2001, but it was done with little idea about what was to be achieved by it.

That was the claim of Jean MacKenzie, senior correspondent for GlobalPost and previously programme director for the Institute for War & Peace Reporting in Kabul, about the decision of president George Bush to send troops into Afghanistan less than a month after the terrorist attacks of 11 September, 2001.

"We had to go in, America had to kick ass because we had been attacked and we had to prove that we were big guys, and there was very little resistance to going in to Afghanistan, Afghanistan was a very convenient ass to kick, because it was not being really defended," said MacKenzie.

MacKenzie, who was taking part in a recent discussion titled: Counterinsurgency and the "War on Terror": Doomed to fail? agreed that America had to react to the terror attacks in New York and Washington. The problem was not the decision to intervene, but  the fact that it was done without a clear idea of what it would accomplish, she said:

"We didn’t need to go in with this open-ended brief of we’re going in there to get rid of al-Quaeda, now we’re going in there so that little girls can go to school and maybe we’re there so women don’t have to wear burqas and now we’re there, as Time magazine tells us, so that women’s noses are not cut off. Where does it stop? We needed to define our goals from the very beginning."

There was also a lack of clarity about who the enemy was, said MacKenzie, who claimed local groups could manipulate NATO or the International Security Assistance Force into fighting their battles by claiming their opponents were Taliban:

"We go into an area, like in Kunar, where two groups are fighting over logging rights – another gets close to us and says they are the Taliban. We start fighting them and they fight back and as soon as they do, they become an insurgency."

As a result of the lack of clarity the rhetoric about the US mission in Afghanistan had taken on a life of its own, MacKenzie argued:

"It’s a very broad statement but I think we are now fighting the Afghan people, the Afghan society. We say the Taliban stone women for adultery, the Taliban stone young couples, the Taliban throw acid in the faces of school children.

But in most of these cases, if you unravel it, it’s not the Taliban, it is the community that has done these things. So if we are fighting those manifestations of Afghan culture, we are not fighting the Taliban, we are fighting Afghan society, we are fighting a culture that we find noxious. That, I think, is quite a bit beyond our brief."

Ten years on, the mood in Afghanistan was one the “darkest despair”, said MacKenzie, adding that there is little trust on the ground in the ability of the Afghan forces to protect the people. In addition, things have gone "way beyond the point" when outside nations could impose anything on the country:

"There was a point at the beginning when there was a certain amount of hope and goodwill among Afghans, but I don’t feel it there any more," she said.

"The Afghans are more and more pessimistic, they have given up on their own government, how do you fight counterinsurgency when you have no legitimate government to partner with? How do we begin to do anything?

Yet the US is likely to leave Afghanistan with "honour and dignity in the strategic communications sense," said MacKenzie, who predicted that from now until the end of 2014 the US administration was going to be "busily engaged in painting a narrative of victory":

All that is required for us to have won is for the media to pack up and go home so there’s no focus on what’s actually happening and for us to redefine victory and to move the goalposts as it were."

Malte Roschinski, a security consultant, political analyst and author who reported from Afghanistan for AFP news agency, was also pessimistic about the future of Afghanistan and said he believed the best that the US could do was to "come up with a good PR strategy and hope for the next six months or so it’s going to stay fairly quiet".

"After that the media focus will have moved away from the country. There will be stories afterwards but the media works in cycles and public attention has just so much bandwidth anyway so it’s just going to be a PR exercise."

By Jasper Smith

As eurozone leaders continue efforts to counter turmoil in the financial markets, a team of inspectors from the IMF and EU are due to arrive in Athens on Monday to assess Greek efforts to sort out their public finances.

Across the Atlantic, Tuesday sees Dominique Strauss-Kahn back in court in New York on rape charges stemming from an incident back in May at the Sofitel Hotel. Prosecutors are said to be considering dropping charges due to supposed weaknesses of his accuser’s testimony.

Also Tuesday, Liberians vote in a referendum on proposed changes to the West African nation’s constitution.

Back in Europe, French President Nicolas Sarkozy is due to finalise plans on Wednesday to reduce his country’s deficit. Sarkozy was forced to return suddenly from holiday amid (apparently unfounded) rumours that France would be the next major economy to lose its triple A credit rating.

In Jerusalem, outspoken Republican commentator Glenn Beck is scheduled to hold his ‘Restoring Courage’ rally.

Meanwhile, at its headquarters in Ethiopia, on Thursday the African Union is holding a pledging conference to raise funds for the ongoing humanitarian crisis in the Horn of Africa.

At the International Criminal Court in The Hague, closing arguments are due to wrap up on Friday in the case against Thomas Lubanga, alleged leader the Union of Congolese Patriots. He faces war crimes charges over allegedly conscripting child soldiers in the DRC.

Saturday sees the ‘Tea Party Express’ bus tour kick off with a rally in Napa, California.

Finally, on Sunday, captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit turns 25. Hamas has held him since 25 June, 2006 when he was just 19.