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

Some of the world’s best conflict photographers recount how they captured their most powerful images by taking us behind the lens and into their lives. Witness their personal and professional battles to engage with, understand, handle and present all forms of conflict in the hopes of making the world better. Nothing brings you closer to the most important human conflicts of our time.

CONFLICT searches for the roots of human conflict––from war to domestic violence to gang violence to rape and beyond––and asks whether and in what ways bearing witness can bring an end to conflict. Personal, social, and philosophical, CONFLICT gives color and context to struggles around the world and makes them personal by bringing viewers closer than they’ve ever been.

Featuring: Pete Muller, Joao Silver, Donna Ferrato, Nicole Tung, Robin Hammond, Eros Hoagland

Directed by Nick Fitzhugh

Watch a taste of the film looking at one of the protagonists, Pete Muller here.

Dr Paul Lowe  is an award-winning photographer and is Course Director for MA Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication. His work has been published in Time, Newsweek, Life, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Observer and The Independent, amongst others. Paul has covered breaking news across the world – including the fall of the Berlin Wall, Nelson Mandela’s release, famine in Africa, the conflict in the former Yugoslavia and the destruction of Grozny. He is a consultant to the World Press Photo foundation in Amsterdam, advising online education of professional photojournalists in the majority world. His book Bosnians, documenting 10 years of the war and post-war situation in Bosnia, was published in April 2005 by Saqi books. His research interests focus on the representation of conflict in photography and the ethical issues this raises.

Jenny Matthews has been a photojournalist since 1982. She has reported on conflict in its various forms from across the world. Past projects include covering the AIDs crisis in Southern India, Afghanistan and the War on Terror, a look at Rape in the Congo and the tsunami in Thailand.  Alongside working for publications such as The Sunday Times, The Independent and the Guardian Weekend, she has also been commissioned to work for Action Aid, Oxfam and Save the Children. Her book Woman in War was short listed for the John Kobal book award.

On Tuesday 3 March, veteran photojournalist Lynsey Addario shared stories from her years covering conflict and human rights crises with a packed audience at the Frontline Club. In a discussion chaired by Alexia Singh, editor-in-charge of Reuters Wider Image, Addario shared insights from her time embedding with the US military in Afghanistan, her capture by Libyan government forces and her experiences of censorship by certain facets of the American press.

Lynsey Addario

Addario touched on the many different ethical issues that she faced as a war photographer on a day to day basis. Notably, the need to weigh up the importance of the story against the need to preserve the respect and privacy of the subjects of her photographs.

Sometimes, she said, the challenge was not whether a story was too sensitive to be told, but how to do justice to its magnitude. In Iraq, Addario came across mass graves. “I had never seen anything like this… people were looking for relatives literally in plastic bags and trying to identify them through bones and pieces of anything that remained of their clothing,” she said.

“The first time I walked up to that [mass grave] I sort of just stood, and I couldn’t even photograph for like 45 minutes. I just looked around and didn’t take any pictures because I couldn’t figure out how to do it.”

Addario also spoke about embedding with a US military medevac team. In this case, the importance of the work had to be measured against preserving the dignity of the injured soldiers she was photographing. “You want to be sensitive, not only to the medics, but to whoever you’re photographing,” she said.

In particular, Addario talked about photographing the last moments of a mortally wounded US soldier. “I was at the foot of the bed and I was shooting. And it was so silent in the room that with every single shutter… I felt completely invasive.”

However, Addario discovered that many of the troops consented to her being there. When one soldier asked her to stop, his colleagues stepped in and asked that she continue shooting. “Three other soldiers stood up and said, ‘No, let her photograph. She needs to be here; this has to be documented,’” Addario told the audience.

Censorship was also discussed as an issue which has featured throughout Addario‘s prolific career. “There are no rules against photographing dead Afghans or Iraqis or Sudanese, but we are not allowed to photograph our own dead, and I have a real issues with that,” she said.

“It’s a way for the government to protect or to stop Americans from… being so anti-war.”

Addario also touched on the censorship imposed by her former editors. “In late February I got an email from my editor, the photo editor [of Life Magazine], and she said ‘I hate to write you this email, but we will never run your pictures from Iraq because my editor think’s they’re too strong for the American public to see.’”

The photographs in question were eventually published by the New York Times Magazine, a publication with which Addario has developed a trusting and fruitful partnership. “Freelancers who cover war… have to be very aware of who they’re working for, and will that publication step up if something does happen,” she said.

Lynsey Addario and Alexia Singh

Addario discussed the benefits and setbacks of working as a woman in Muslim countries. In Iraq and Afghanistan she could access and photograph women, something which her male colleagues could not. Her gender allowed her unique access, particularly during her initial trips to Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan.

“I did a lot of work in the women’s hospitals at the time because there weren’t many female journalists, and as a woman I was allowed into these female-only areas and the Taliban couldn’t come in,” she said.

“People underestimate me a lot, which is great. They just think, ‘Oh she’s a woman, she’s not going to do anything,’ which to me is such a great benefit.”

In this regard however, Addario faces many double standards. “No one ever talks about male war correspondents who go to war with an entire family at home and what happens if they get killed,” she said.

Addario spoke of her reluctance to be defined solely by her motherhood. “So few people are honest about it, and that frustrates me because you open yourself up to a lot of criticism when you talk about the ambivalence of motherhood, or that it’s not all the most glorious thing on the planet.”

Becoming a mother has had an impact on the risks Addario now takes. “I’m not running into combat the way I used to… I’m trying to navigate it in a safer way than I know how, but I’m not stopping being a photographer.”

An audience member asked whether there is still a conflict or country in which Addario is keen to work. “I started working in South Sudan quite a bit,” she said, “and I always want to go back there, I feel like there’s a lot to cover… I think I generally do manage to get to where I want to be though.”

Lynsey Addario signing copies of her book

For more information on It’s What I Do: A Photographer’s Life of Love and War, click here.

Watch and listen back below:

At the Frontline Club on Wednesday 16 April illustrator George Butler and features editor for The Guardian and editor of the G2 supplement Malik Meer discussed whether there is room for supposedly more subjective and abstract illustration in hard-news when photography dominates.

Malik Meer and George Butler discuss illustration at the Frontline Club

First, Butler explained what is special about illustration:

“Drawing offers the viewer, the audience, a different perspective. It encapsulates the passing of time in one image, those two or three hours, say, on the street just observing quietly in the corner . . . are invaluable. . . . I didn’t want to go to Aleppo to compete with the photographers, who do a fantastic job capturing the frontline for the front page, . . . I wanted to offer a different angle, a more human fourth dimension . . . to capture a period of time and then distil it into one image.

 

“ . . . Things move, people come and go, and you pick something that you like to draw and perhaps it’s a figure and they then walk off and come back and they’re in a different position. . . . Sometimes that means highlighting one thing. . . . If there’s a particularly interesting character why shouldn’t he be closer to the foreground? And if there’s something that’s not very interesting . . . I draw it smaller and at the back. It’s a very personal thing; if anyone else was to do it they would probably pick different things.”

Do you think people react differently to an illustrator than to a photographer who just shoots a photo and leaves?

“I see it as a very open and honest process, one where people can see over your shoulder see what you’re doing, they recognise their friends, the places that they work. . . . Importantly, they don’t feel threatened. They’re not made to feel uncomfortable or made to pose. . . . What this means is you’re very often afforded access to places that you wouldn’t otherwise be allowed to see.

 

“. . . [It] shows that you care about them, that you’re willing to sit and spend time with them. . . . There’s something very nice about the . . . handmade creative process that comes across because it’s so personal from start to finish.”

Great lecture at the @frontlineclub with @george_butler last night. Fantastic and inspiring artwork. Well worth the trip.

— Alex Wood (@AJ_Wood15) April 17, 2014

An audience member asked, does the activity of drawing act as a barrier, to put some of the emotions you have towards the scene into something?

“Absolutely, I think people have talked about how they can hide behind their camera when these sorts of things happen and the drawing board is a physical barrier. Certainly during the little lad in hospital [with an amputated leg] it felt like it was a way of distracting myself, just copying exactly what’s in front you rather than thinking about it for too long.”

Can illustrations ever be as powerful as photographs?

“I think the photograph is fantastic at its job . . . engaging a huge audience on the front page. But I think if you know a little bit about the subject or if you’ve seen a lot of photographs of the subject, which you sometimes have now then, illustration can be a great, layered way of capturing attention.”

Meer added on why he choose to run Butler’s illustrations in The Guardian instead of photographs:

“We’d run quite a lot of reports from Syria, insider reports, broader political pieces and you resort to the pictures that are available and they are the ones that everyone sees at the time. They do capture incredible moments but the minute you see something like this [illustration] it just captures something else. . . . I think they’re as haunting as classic conflict images.”

George Butler whilst drawing in Syria

But with illustration being such a subjective art form and Butler himself having admitted he leaves things out of an image or brings scenes to the forefront, where does he think the line between style and story should be drawn?

“For me sometimes when I’m on holiday or in a different part of the world, not in Syria, it’s quite nice just to draw things that you know you can make look good . . . but in terms of Syria it was always any kind of opportunity to draw because there was always a story to draw that was as important. . . . I suppose if you’re really true to reportage you’d have the two offering as much fifty–fifty, story and good-looking picture.”

It could be said that because they are such beautiful pictures that they lend a fairy tale-like quality to what is a very present war?

“Obviously as photographers or anybody creative you’ve always learnt to make things look good and yet the things that are in front of you don’t look in any way good. . . . I think people understand that as an artist . . . that you’re very much giving your interpretation of it. . . . I guess it’s just about being as honest to the subject as possible.”

Watch and listen the full discussion below:

Letters to Myself, which screened at the Frontline Club on Monday 14 April, follows Russian photographer Oleg Klimov as he returns to the places he documented during the disintegration of the Soviet Union in the 1990s and into the 2000s. The film combines Klimov‘s memories with the stories of the people he photographed at the time.

Director Masha Novikova spent some time filming Klimov in Chechnya in 2000 and later in 2003–05 whilst working on a different film but has known Klimov for over 20 years and has wanted to film him at work for just as long but it took some time to secure funding.

Novikova said through a translator after the screening:

“It was my first war and my first time in a ruined city and of course it was quite tragic for me . . . for Oleg it hasn’t been the first time so . . . he was much more cynical than I was.”

Klimov, speaking through the translator via Skype from his mother’s home near Moscow which appears in the film, spoke about how he felt being the subject of the film instead of being behind the camera:

“It did take us quite a long time, Masha and I, the crew, everybody was looking for the people we were asking about, trying to find out about their stories and it was a very moving, very emotional time for me, as you can imagine 20 years later. It took me back to those times.”

Oleg Klimov speaks via Skype at the Frontline Club

A question from the audience asked what he thought had changed in Grozny, having been back to since the war? Klimov said:

“I’ve actually seen Grozny during three times, pre-war, wartime and post-wartime. . . . These are three completely different realities.

 

“The first reality is basically Chechnya the republic, just like perhaps the majority of post-Soviet republics. People just lived normal lives, it was not very exciting, nothing was really happening. Although you could see that conflicts started breaking out.

 

“ . . . The second reality is the reality of war which is again quite similar to any . . . place which is in the state of war, which is terror and horror.”

 

“ . . . The third reality, which I’ve witnessed the most recent time I’ve been to Chechnya was last year, . . . that feeling was basically surreal, because when you walk down the street knowing about the two previous realities, having seen all that I’ve seen, the question rises that you do not understand what it was all for, why did it all happen? . . . All this money that went first on the wars, and then to restore the city it’s just incomprehensible.”

A further question from the audience asked, how did Grozny change so quickly, who rebuilt it?

Klimov said:

“This can be what we call compromise at best for the Russian government. . . . Because they couldn’t win the war in Chechnya . . . the idea was to buy peace there. . . . They’ve invested a lot of money . . . but the price that the people are paying, that’s where . . . the fear comes from. . . . There is no freedom of speech, no freedom of expression. . . . That’s the price they pay for peace and stability.”

What was it all for? People versus characters: what's left when the motherland gets covered in skyscrapers @frontlineclub with @PhotoAmmon

— Rasa Jusionyte (@rasajusionyte) April 14, 2014

Novikova added:

“Even though it [the war] was a terrible time people did speak out very freely . . . about defending the land and about being free and independent. And I felt a huge respect and love for these people . . . but now I see that even my friends they try to avoid calling things as they are, they use very vague language.”

How does Klimov approach the wars he photographs? How does he feel about the wars as a Russian?

The translator explained:

“It’s very difficult being a Russian, while Russia is fighting Chechnya because of course this dilemma of being a citizen of Russia and being a journalist, . . . [he was] trying to find ways to be neutral, to be right on the front line, not choosing sides. It was really difficult. . . . At one point, Oleg decided that he is going to be guided by a principle, he is not actually going to choose a nation or a people but he is going to be empathetic with the weakest one or the side that is unarmed.”

And what are Klimov’s thoughts on the recent outbreak in Crimea?

“It’s a very absurd and strange situation when we have these polite armed men with Kalashnikovs who nobody knows who they are but everybody knows that they are either special forces or private army that is linked of course to Russia. But it’s not the official troops, it’s not the official Russian army so it’s a strange situation where everybody understands but nobody actually names it or discusses it as official Russian army.”

Producer James Brabazon talks about Tim Hetherington’s life and legacy

“Why do young men go to war?” was asked again and again at the Between the Lines follow-up screening of Which Way is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington on Thursday 17 October at the Lexi Cinema. It was a question that occupied Hetherington during his lifetime and a question that director Sebastian Junger and producer James Brabazon aimed to discover about Tim in this powerful and moving film.

A very candid Q&A with the producer Brabazon followed the film – which covered the late Tim Hetherington’s career as a war photographer – whose honest revelations added an extra dimension to the screening.

“The essential issue is that young men find comfort in war. One of the unspeakable truths is that it’s fun. You can see at the start of the film, every single man is laughing,” Brabazon points out, referring to the opening scene where amongst the heat of the fires burning in the Libyan corridors there is a sense that the men who run around with their AK-47s are doing something fun. “That’s uncomfortable,” he adds.

“Somehow water always finds its course and there is something about the theatre of war that bonds young men like you don’t see anywhere else. Tim was interested to see why young men go to war. . .   And did he need to be there? No.

 

“But yet he finds himself at the front line, having a good time. It’s that vortex of violence.”

When an audience member asked Brabazon if Tim’s death compelled him to leave war reporting, we were even given a glimpse of his reasons for going. Contrasting himself to director Sebastian Junger, who decided to stop going in to report conflict, he confessed he felt he had a duty to show people what was going on.

“The way that [Junger] feels is that when you’re working in war, you think you’re putting yourself at risk, but in fact what you’re doing is endangering and putting at risk the lives of those people around you, that love and care for you.

 

“I felt that after Tim died, I really couldn’t stop. I felt somehow stopping would constitute a betrayal of our friendship,” he admitted.

 

“I’m not really very good at much,” he said after a searching pause. “There are lots of things that I can’t do. There is this one thing I can do, and when I get it right, I’m not bad at it. But I feel all we do after all is tell other people’s stories, and if you can tell people’s stories who live at the ragged, violent margins of society and you give those people a voice in a way that is translated so that other people can understand it – if you don’t do it, then who will? Because someone needs to, and I feel I can.”

His admission is something also seen in Hetherington throughout the film and you witness the intensity with which he interacts with the people he photographs and brings out the truth. “He made work to be seen,” said Brabazon, when asked about Hetherington’s legacy. “And he wanted to affect change.”

Sebastian Junger has gone on to found RISC Training – “Reporters instructed in saving colleagues” – as a response to a lack of medical knowledge among frontline reporters.

Between the Lines was a three-day festival that took place at Rich Mix from 1 to 3 March co-organised by DocHouse and the Frontline Club. In a series of follow up events we continue to explore the challenges facing documentary makers, investigative journalists and citizen reporters in the new media landscape.

On 20 April 2011, photographer and filmmaker Tim Hetherington was killed by mortar fire in the city of Misrata, Libya. He bled out in the back of a pick-up truck on his way to the hospital.

In his work Hetherington focused on the experience of war from the perspective of the individual. Through his photographs, writing and films, he offered new ways to think about human suffering as a result of war. He captured the perspective of the soldiers and the civilians, caught up in the many conflicts he reported. The work he did throughout his ten-year career has established him as one of the most important photojournalists of his generation.

Colleague and co-director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary Restrepo, Sebastian Junger thoughtfully portrays Hetherington’s life and work. At a time when greater numbers of journalists are losing their lives covering conflict, the film also addresses the high risks taken by war journalists.

Directed by Sebastian Junger
Produced by James Brabazon
Duration: 79′
Year: 2013

On Friday 18 January the sound of spontaneous applause rang out from the upper room at the Frontline Club as the Bafta nominated documentary ‘McCullin’ came to an end. The room was packed despite the snow, and there was eager anticipation in the air for the Q&A with director Jacqui Morris and producer David Morris, which followed the screening.

Through intimate interviews with Don McCullin and his former editor at The Sunday Times, Sir Harold Evans, ‘McCullin’ chronicles the photographic escapades of the renowned photojournalist, and gives a unique insight into his experiences. The film also uses extensive archive footage and incorporates many of Don McCullin’s photographs, some of which were previously unseen. Director Jacqui Morris described the process:

We shot the film in three days, and archive research and post production was 18 months – a massive job!

Don McCullin became famous for his harrowing images of warfare and humanitarian disaster, which were published in The Sunday Times magazine throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s. These publications, Jacqui Morris explained, were to become of central importance to the film:

I think they are hugely important in the film, the [Sunday Times] magazines, hugely important, because we’ve all grown up with those Don McCullin shots, but actually when you see them as double page spread as somebody would see them on a Sunday morning . . . the truth you know, from a truthful photographer, there is nothing like that now, nothing like it. And I think they’re incredibly important.

An audience member pointed out how the film also provides a history of warfare in the latter half of the 20th century. Jacqui Morris explained how this element of the film evolved:

That came as I was reading the [Sunday Times] magazines, I thought if I don’t know [about these things] other people might not know.

Producer David Morris added:

It was an organic process but we thought it was an interesting process to show people the history of the second half of the 20th century.

The discussion also explored the comparisons between Don McCullin’s printed images and new trends in photo-based journalism, affected by the image-saturated landscape of social media:

[There is] an infinitely huge amount more information now than you had then, and so those images that you got in The Sunday Times, and other magazines, had a much bigger impact than they’d ever do now.  I don’t think it’s fair, really, to expect any publication to ever have that kind of influence again, it just will not happen.

But David Morris added that:

There is a thing about still photography and the still image that really does haunt you.

For information on future screenings, you can visit the film’s Facebook page here.

View in iTunes

Just announced: John Laurence will be joining the panel.

Join us for this special event to discuss the iconic war reportage, to mark 35 years since the end of the Vietnam War.

This special event brings together reporters who covered Vietnam to reflect on the war that changed the way the public think about conflict.

Saturation bombing, worldwide protests, napalm, agent orange and an estimated two million lives lost.

Has any war since had such an impact on the public psyche? Why was the reaction to the carnage in Vietnam so strong? Was it because of a lack of conviction in the cause the US was fighting for? Or was it because of these reporters and photographers and their work that so poignantly captured the brutality of war?

Jon Swain was the only British journalist in Phnom Penh when it fell to the Khmer Rouge in April 1975. His coverage of these events and their aftermath won him the British Press Award for Journalist of the Year. His story was retold in the Oscar-winning film, The Killing Fields and his bestselling book River of Time. Swain wrote an article about covering Vietnam in his early 20s in the most recent issue of Frontline: A Broadsheet.

French war photographer Patrick Chauvel was only 18 when he started covering the Vietnam war. In the years that followed he has covered over 20 wars and in 1995 won the World Press Photo award for Spot News. He is the author of two books in French, Rapporteur de Guerre and Sky.

John Laurence, author of the prize-winning memoir The Cat from Hue, covered the war for CBS News from 1965 to 1970 and made the multi-award winning documentary The World of Charlie Company. He also covered 15 other wars in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

This special event will be moderated by Michael Nicholson OBE, former senior foreign correspondent for ITN. Nicholson reported for over 25 years from 15 conflicts, including Vietnam. The film Welcome to Sarajevo and his book Natasha’s Story were both based on his experiences covering the war in Bosnia.