Synopsis

Anka (Magdalena Popławska) is married to Witek (Michał Zurawski), an acclaimed war journalist who spends most of his time away from home reporting on nascent conflicts in the Caucasus and Afghanistan. The horrors of Witek’s profession are soon transposed to Anka’s domestic reality as her psyche becomes increasingly fractured, both by a fear for her husband’s fate and the inequitable expectations of a woman’s role at home. Based partly on an autobiographical book by Grażyna Jagielska, 53 Wars was nominated for awards at Torino Film Festival, Karlovy Vary Film Festival, and Camerimage.

Running time: 82 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

The Frontline Club will be screening MOSUL, a new film by Olivier Sarbil and James Jones followed by a Q&A with Olivier and James.

In October 2016, an elite team of Iraqi Special Forces was tasked with leading the fight to defeat ISIS in Mosul. It was the beginning of a brutal battle of attrition that was to last almost nine months.

Filmed over the course of the whole campaign, MOSUL follows the experiences of four young soldiers: Anmar, a college graduate seeking revenge after his father was the victim of a suicide attack; Hussein, a ruthless sniper and aspiring football player; Jamal, a wise-cracking sergeant; and Amjad, a young recruit excited to be on the frontline.

Full of hope and good intentions at the beginning of the campaign, the soldiers are forced to confront the reality of fighting an elusive and vicious enemy in a city full of trapped civilians who are themselves fearful and suspicious of the army. And with victory in sight, tragedy strikes. When ISIS eventually capitulates, much of the city is destroyed, and the surviving soldiers are left haunted by what they have seen and done.

Watch the trailer here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGRsBxgO4j4

Credits:
Filmed and Directed by Olivier Sarbil
Co-Directed and Produced by James Jones
Produced by Raney Aronson-Rath, Dan Edge
Edited by Ella Newton
Production Managed by Pip Lacey

A PBS Frontline production in association with Mongoose Pictures and Channel 4

l-r: Charles Glass, Sigrid Rausing, Janine di Giovanni

On Tuesday 5 May, Middle East editor of Newsweek Janine di Giovanni and veteran broadcaster and journalist Charles Glass joined an audience at the Frontline Club for an insightful discussion chaired by Sigrid Rausing, editor of Granta magazine.

Reflecting on the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and the human realities of war, di Giovanni and Glass discussed their recent contributions to the latest edition of Granta: The Map is Not the Territory, which explores the distinctions between representation and reality.

“The theme that comes to me over and over when I think of Iraq is loss,” said di Giovanni. Her article, After Zero Hour, looks back on her time reporting on the Iraq conflict, remembering old friends who have since disappeared, emigrated or fled.

Di Giovanni described driving the length and width of Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion, aware that, as the impending war approached, many of the places she visited would soon cease to exist.

She read an extract from After Zero Hour: “With that invasion and the insurgent war that followed, Iraq would virtually disappear. The land of date trees, oasis and desert would be marked by checkpoints and graves.”

Glass followed with a short extract from his article, The Battle of Kessab, which examines the fate of the eponymous town in Syria. Kessab was the last remaining Armenian town in Syria, after the Turkish army relinquished control of portions of its border with Syria to Islamist rebels in 2014.Rausing responded to the reading: “What you describe so beautifully in the piece is really the context of the Armenian genocide. How everything that happens reminds people of the original genocide.”

An audience member asked Glass and di Giovanni to comment on the importance of lyrical writing in journalistic articles.

“We have the great privilege of writing poetically for Granta,” said di Giovanni. “For me, writing in a lyrical way in terms of narrative and characterisation is much easier.”

“This kind of language is so important,” said Rausing. “It’s the only kind of writing that will endure and have a life after.”

The discussion then covered the role played by journalists in stimulating positive political change, by providing on-the-ground evidence that can filter into policymaking.

“In some sense there’s a limit to what journalism can do. We can bring awareness, we can tell the story,” said di Giovanni. “The gap between reporting and policymaking is huge… there is an enormous gap between what is happening in the Security Council and in Obama’s office and what is actually happening on the ground. And that is hugely frustrating.”

A final audience question discussed the role of long-form journalism and an increased focus on human stories to encourage empathy and eliminate compassion fatigue.

“For the most part newspapers don’t have space… there are very few outlets. Thank god these things exist, but it’s hard to make a living doing that,” said Glass, highlighting Granta, The New York Review of Books and The Guardian as some of the few publications that champion longer pieces.

“For me it always comes down to the people,” said di Giovanni. “Then you could weave in the humanitarian disaster, you could get the political involvement in it, you could bring in the diplomacy… but I think it’s coming back. I think people want to read longer pieces.”

Subscribe to Granta magazine here.

Frontline Club founder Vaughan Smith chats with Ben De Pear of Channel, 4, Marcus Mabry of The New York Times, freelancer Emma Beals, and AFP’s David Williams.

As many major news organisations close foreign bureaus, freelancers are called on more and more to cover global conflicts. They face risks often without the structure, training and resources that come with having a large media outlet behind you.

Continuing a conversation that began at the end of October in New York at the Overseas Press Club of America (OPC), Vaughan Smith, founder of the Frontline Club, spoke with leading editors at the club in London on Tuesday 18 November. They discussed the importance of pay to reflect risk, training, and new ways of determining how much responsibility for freelancers news outlets should take on.

Joining Smith were David Williams, deputy global news editor at Agence France-Presse (AFP); Marcus Mabry, editor at large for The New York Times and president of the Overseas Press Club of America (OPC); Ben De Pear, editor of Channel 4 News; and Emma Beals, a multimedia independent journalist covering Syria and Iraq and member of the board at the Frontline Freelance Register (FFR).

New Standards
How freelancers are folded in to media organisations vary from outlet to outlet, so what should best practice look like?

“There’s an inverse relationship between the amount of control and the amount of responsibility they should take on for that person,” Beals said of the freelancer–editor relationship.

“We commission people in a very clear way. They have to take a hostile environment awareness course. We have to know them,” said De Pear. “Do you trust this person, are they trained, will this person deliver something we will put on television?” he said are important questions they ask, adding, “the Arab Spring was a bit of a nightmare. Libya was a fantasy war zone. Anyone who had a camera flew in.”

“I think the future is more to incorporate regular freelancers into our structures,” said Williams, pointing out that they made a tough decision after two of AFP’s top editors met with freelancers on the Turkish–Syrian border in 2012. “We will not accept production from freelancers where we don’t dare to venture ourselves,” he said, “we don’t want to encourage freelancers to take risks that our own journalists won’t take.”

Better Pay = Safety
Marginal wages for a story from a conflict zone don’t allow freelancers to invest in much needed training and equipment, argued Beals and many from the audience.

“You have to pay them more than $300 for 1,000 words in Syria,” she said. “It’s a professional work force with unprofessionalised wages. The pay is about safety,” Beals added, noting a recent story had her covering her expenses, which were twice the rate she was getting paid, up front with a promise of reimbursement months later.

Treating freelancers like a member of the AFP team under a new approach, said Williams, means they have more financial backup. “We bring them into the same structure that an AFP reporter would have. Generally they should have the same benefits.”

Smith said he is astounded by the number of freelancers he meets who have not been on a hostile environment training course. “We did a survey of freelancers at FFR,” he said, “a third said they thought that the editors they dealt with didn’t give a fig about their safety.”

You can watch the talk and listen again online here:

From left: Vaughan Smith, Paul Lowe, Charif Kiwan, Remy Ourdan and Patrick Chauvel at the Frontline Club.

At the screening of Syria – Snapshots of History in the Making on Thursday 29 May at the Frontline Club, host Vaughan Smith was joined by Abounaddara Films producer Charif Kiwan, former Le Monde editor and founder of the WARM Foundation Remy Ourdan, and photographers Patrick Chauvel and Paul Lowe, for a pre-screening discussion as well as a Q&A after the film. The journalists, all members of the WARM foundation dedicated to war reporting and war art, discussed the impact and importance of reporting from conflict zones leading up to the documentary.

When asked to first of all introduce the concept of WARM to the audience, Remy Ourdan explained:

“We all came together for the ‘Sarajevo 2012’ reunion of war reporters, and we founded WARM because nothing like it existed yet; there was no project about all conflicts and about bringing together reporters of different backgrounds.”

Patrick Chauvel added:

“The main idea is that we don’t want the stories to stay only in the news. . . . We don’t want hear people saying anymore, ‘We didn’t know.’ People used to say that a lot, especially in 1944. Today, with projects like that, you can say, ‘I didn’t want to know,’ but then you’re responsible for what you don’t know.”

One of the projects collaborating with WARM that wants to make sure that people are well informed is Abounaddara Films, a group of Syrian filmmakers that through their short films want to offer a counter-perspective to the mainstream coverage of the revolution. Charif Kiwan explained:

“Mainstream media failed to represent our society with dignity, so we took to the internet to tell our own story. We release one short documentary every Friday. We are all volunteers and we release the films anonymously and without any funding. So far we have released around 160 films. Tonight’s feature film was made with these short films.”

The dangers of misrepresentation by the media as well as the question of how the coverage of war changed, which Kiwan mentioned, were then discussed by the panel, with Patrick Chauvel suggesting that:

“Technology today makes reporting easier. You have the people from the country who are the first to report, which I think is great although some reporters say it kills the job. . . . When I see people with their phones in the crowd filming for me it’s like somebody calling me saying, ‘Can you please come and help us.’ In the end we’re all a team.”

Paul Lowe added:

“There’s always a kind of conflict between the commercial aspect of what you do as a journalist and the ethical aspect. What that actually does, though, is to drive you to go and find stories that are unique and original; so what you eventually get is a network of witnesses.”

After the film, which featured the daily lives of Syrians during the war in one-on-one interviews as well as exclusive shots from the conflict itself, Abounaddara producer Charif Kiwan answered questions on the documentary, with one audience member asking whether there was a way for everyone to support the project. He replied:

“What is most important is that we tell the media, ‘We are here and you cannot tell our story as you like.’ It’s also important that people keep sharing the films and therefore signify that they agree with what we’re doing.”

In the end one audience member asked if and how Kiwan‘s view on the revolution has changed and how that is reflected in the film, to which he gave a simple answer:

“We started filming demonstrators in the streets and ended with filming Islamists; we started with filming the sky and ended with the earth; we started with hope and ended with despair.”

Watch and listen again here:

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/the-first-female-war

Clare Hollingworth was signed up to The Daily Telegraph in August 1939 as the world was rushing towards war. In a career spanning 60 years, her big scoops include being the first to spot the massing of German tanks on the Polish border, signalling the start of the Second World War, and identifying Kim Philby as ‘the third man’. She has reported wars and revolutions in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Now 102, she lives in Hong Kong.

Gerda Taro had a similar passion for journalism. Tragically, her career was cut short when, in July 1937 whilst covering the Spanish civil war, she became the first female war photographer to die on assignment. Aged just 26, she was beginning to make a name for herself and it has recently been revealed how integral she was to the early career of Robert Capa.

Clare Hollingworth and Gerda Taro were two of the first female war correspondents, and their pioneering courage and conviction paved the way for many who have followed. We will be joined by Patrick Garrett, Hollingworth’s great nephew who is writing a book about her life, and Jane Rogoyska, author of Gerda Taro: Inventing Robert Capa. They will be exploring the lives and work of these two extraordinary women, united by a passion for journalism.

Chaired by Deborah Haynes, defence editor at The Times.

With:

Patrick Garrett has worked as an editor for many of the major broadcasters, including the BBC, ITN, ABC, CBS and NBC, reporting from Eastern Europe, Asia and Africa.

Jane Rogoyska is a writer and filmmaker. She has worked extensively in filmmaking across a range of genres and has written two feature screenplays. Gerda Taro – Inventing Robert Capa is her first full-length book. With the aid of a Wingate Scholarship, she is currently working on a book about Katyn, the massacre of 14,000 Polish officers by the Soviet secret police during World War II. She is a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at the University of Greenwich for 2013-14.

Kate Brooks is an award-winning American photojournalist who has covered the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan throughout the post 9/11 decade and into the Arab Spring. Her photographs have been extensively published in magazines such as TIME, Newsweek, The Atlantic, The New Yorker and Smithsonian and have also been exhibited in Europe and the U.S. In 2011 she published her first book In the Light of Darkness: A Photographer’s Journey After 9/11. Most recently she has working on her second documentary film project, dedicating herself to Africa’s poaching epidemic. 

Photography: (L) Clare Hollingworth & Tim Page, Vietnam by François Sully, 1968 © Archives and Special Collections, Healey Library, UMass Boston; (R) Gerda Taro & Robert Capa, Paris by Fred Stein, 1935 © Estate of Fred Stein, FredStein.com, courtesy International Center of Photography.

In October the Frontline Club held a tenth anniversary exhibition at the Prix Bayeux Awards and on 13 November they welcomed Prix Bayeux to London for an event to celebrate their twentieth anniversary. The event brought together past winners who each presented their distinguished pieces of reporting and looked back on 20 years of reporting conflict.

The evening was opened by Jon Swain, award winning journalist and guest president of the Prix Bayeux jury, who explained how the awards are very much about the work produced rather than, as is often the case, who knows who. The discussion was chaired by Frontline Club founder and 2011 Bayeux-Calvados award winner, Vaughan Smith.

L-R Vaughan Smith, Adrien Jaulmes, Neil Connery, Christina Lamb and Jeremy Bowen

Jeremy Bowen, BBC Middle East editor and winner of the award in 2009 for reporting on the aftermath of the 2009 Gaza War for BBC1’s Panorama. He accompanied a doctor from Gaza who lost several daughters and a niece in an Israeli shelling, the terrible irony being that he had spent a lot of his career working for peace with Israel:

“I went around the room and he told me where they were laying. I thought that if I’d put it in a more factual manner, it would have more impact. It worked out in that sense but as ever, one of the ambivalences [of war reporting] is that we report on the back of someone else’s tragedy.”

Great panel with @PrixBayeux winners @frontlineclub tonight, note the temporary exhibition with winning photos. pic.twitter.com/T9Wx25Efqc

— wotienke (@wotienke) November 13, 2013

Christina Lamb, author and journalist with The Sunday Times and winner of the award in 2009, read from Mission Impossible, an account of her time as an embedded journalist with the British military in Afghanistan. Mentioning the Green Book that requires reporters to have their copy pre-approved by military press officers, Lamb reflected:

“There’s a fine line between that and censorship. We [journalists] failed because we should have gotten up against it, all of us.”

Prix Bayeux exhibited photographs from previous winners of the award during the evening. [picture credit: Caroline Schmitt]

“The vast majority of people involved in news-gathering who are injured or killed are locals to that country. They’re not only journalists, but drivers, translators. . . . We as an industry have a huge moral responsibility for those people and I wonder whether we really deliver that as much as we need to.”

Adrien Jaulmes, reporter with Le Figaro and winner of the Bayeux-Calvados award in 2007, he said of reporting in Syria:

“Your moral duty is to share the dangers while you’re there. Journalists suddenly become the targets in big cities because they have money, and that changed the game for us within weeks.”

Watch and listen back here:

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/twenty-years-of-war-reporting

The Frontline Club hosted an evening of reflections marking the publication of Granta 125: After the War on 17 October. Two correspondents shared their personal views on developments on the ground, after the battles are fought and the camera teams have moved on to cover other wars.

From left to right: Roma Tearne, Frances Harrison and Lindsey Hilsum

Roma Tearne, Sri Lankan artist, filmmaker and novelist, spoke to Lindsey Hilsum, International Editor for Channel 4 News who covered the Rwandan genocide and Frances Harrison, former BBC Correspondent in Sri Lanka.

Watch it back and listen to the podcast:

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/granta-125-after-the-war-with

‘Reflections’ at the Frontline Club brings well known journalists to the stage to look back on their careers. Incorporating video clips, still images and articles selected by them, the host Vin Ray describes it as “a cross between Desert Island Discs and This is your Life”.  It is held in association with the BBC Academy College of Journalism.

On 29th May Alex Thomson, chief correspondant for Channel 4 News and the recent winner of the prestigious RTS Television Journalist of the Year joined Vin Ray.

Alex Thomson with Vin Ray. Photo credit: Caroline Schmitt

The first to be shown were two black and white still images showing the famous albino boy in Biafra by Don McCullin and Eddie Adam’s man being shot in Vietnam, the Saigon Execution.

“There is something peculiarly arresting about these photos; something that makes you stop and look about a photograph, different from television. I can visualise still images from Syria more easily than some of the moving images.”

When asked about what safety measures the Channel 4 News team take in conflict zones, Thomson shared an anecdote about one of his early experiences:

“When we started doing the Croatian War, we had a white diesel W2 Golf and wrote TV on it with black gaffa tape because that’s what they do in war movies. . . We just didn’t know what we were doing.”

When Ray asked what draws the correspondent to conflict zones, he stated:

“I do it because I like doing it. I do it because I don’t want to stand outside the House of Commons or in the City. That would drive me into a very early state of unhappiness.”

Thomson then read to the packed audience the report ‘Massacre in Sanctuary’ about the Qana Massacre in southern Lebanon. Written by Robert Fisk, Middle East Correspondent for The Independent in April 1996,  according to Thomson it was an example of “first-class, unencumbered and passionate eye-witness reporting.”:

“When you just look at that, when you take that apart as a piece of writing, there’s so much going on, there’s so much conveyed. . . . I just think that something like that just stands and there will always be a place – online or in the newspaper – there will always be a place for that kind of writing – direct, passionate reportage.”

Another issue raised by Thomson was the underreported issue of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) amongst soldiers operating remote drones in the US, which he elaborated on after presenting the infamous helicopter gunship footage leaked to WikiLeaks:

“They [USAF drone operators in Nevada] do a shift, they operate a drone and go back to see the assessment, so they see what the drone has done. They see the people  and the bits of people lying there . . . and switch off their computers. . . . Half an hour later they are in the shopping mall with their kids. That’s incredibly difficult for a human brain to link up. . . . Post-traumatic stress isn’t just found on the battlefield, it’s found on the virtual, real battlefield amongst drone operators as well.”

He finished with his well known foot-in-the-door interview with Kelvin MacKenzie, former editor of The Sun, to inquire about the newspapers infamous editorial take on the aftermath of the Hillsborough disaster:

“Nasty. Vindictive. Pointless. Unpleasant. Personal. Tawdry. Cheap…theatrical. It’s all of that. Every time I see it, I feel more sorry for him actually. . . I started laughing, that was the problem . . . I couldn’t believe the way he mishandled it.”

Watch the full video or listen to the podcast below:

https://soundcloud.com/frontlineclub/reflections-with-alex-thomson