The headline on a UNESCO report from last December sums up a grim reality: “Journalists killed in 2024: a heavy death toll in conflict zones for the second year running.”
In Gaza, in Ukraine, and in other battlegrounds around the world, photojournalists and reporters continue to risk their lives to document the brutal impact of war on combatants and innocent civilians. What compels them to take on such dangerous assignments? Two new Oscar-contending documentaries provide insight into that important but unsettling question.
On the latest episode of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast, we open the mic to Love+War co-director E. Chai Vasarhelyi and the protagonist of her documentary, Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario. We also speak with Craig Renaud, director of Armed Only with a Camera, a documentary about his brother – the late filmmaker and photojournalist Brent Renaud – as well as producer Juan Arredondo, who went into the field with Brent at the outset of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Addario has captured extraordinary images in Ukraine, Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas of intense conflict. Outside Kyiv she was injured in an attack by Russian forces that killed civilians just a few meters away from her. The National Geographic film reveals how Addario attempts to balance her work with motherhood; she is raising two children with her husband in London while regularly going into the field with the knowledge she might never return home.
Brent Renaud paid the ultimate price for trying to capture the plight of civilians driven from their homes by the millions in the Ukraine war. Arredondo, who was at Renaud’s side when their vehicle came under fire from a Russian soldier, takes us back to that fateful day in Irpin, Ukraine. Craig Renaud shares the heart-wrenching story of traveling to Ukraine to retrieve his brother’s body and bringing him back home to Arkansas.
Armed Only with a Camera begins streaming on HBO Max on October 21. Love+War opens theatrically on October 29 before premiering on National Geographic on November 6 and on Disney+ and Hulu on November 7.
The conversations with Vasarhelyi and Addario, and Renaud and Arredondo, are among the most powerful we have recorded for Doc Talk.
Doc Talk is hosted by Oscar winner John Ridley (12 Years a Slave, Shirley) and Matt Carey, Deadline’s senior documentary editor. Doc Talk is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios.
Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including Spotify, iHeart and Apple.
