Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? the Life and Time of Tim Hetherington
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Mongrel Media Presents WHICH WAY IS THE FRONT LINE FROM HERE? THE LIFE AND TIME OF TIM HETHERINGTON A film by Sebastian Junger (79 min., USA, 2013) Language: English Distribution Publicity Bonne Smith Star PR 1028 Queen Street West Tel: 416-488-4436 Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M6J 1H6 Fax: 416-488-8438 Tel: 416-516-9775 Fax: 416-516-0651 E-mail: [email protected] E-mail: [email protected] www.mongrelmedia.com High res stills may be downloaded from http://www.mongrelmedia.com/press.html For Immediate Release WHICH WAY IS THE FRONT LINE FROM HERE? THE LIFE AND TIME OF TIM HETHERINGTON A MOVING PORTRAIT OF THE ACCLAIMED WAR PHOTOGRAPHER AND FILMMAKER BY JOURNALIST SEBASTIAN JUNGER HIS “RESTREPO” CO-DIRECTOR On April 20, 2011, shortly after the release of his documentary “Restrepo” — and only six weeks after attending the Oscar® ceremony as a nominee — photographer and filmmaker Tim Hetherington was killed by mortar fire in the city of Misrata, Libya, where he’d been covering the civil war. He bled out in the back of a pick-up truck while being raced to the hospital, comforted by a Spanish photojournalist who was holding his hand and trying to keep him awake. Those moments ended a brilliant ten-year career in which Hetherington not only covered such dramatic frontline stories as Liberia and Afghanistan, but also transcended the conventional boundaries of image-making to become one of the most important journalists of his generation. In the powerful new feature-length HBO documentary WHICH WAY IS THE FRONT LINE FROM HERE? THE LIFE AND TIME OF TIM HETHERINGTON, bestselling author Sebastian Junger (“The Perfect Storm,” “War”), Hetherington’s “Restrepo” co-director, traces his close friend’s work across the world's battlefields to reveal what made him such a singular talent — and remarkable human being. The film also illuminates the incredible risks of the combat journalists' profession, at a time when they are dying with greater and greater frequency in war zones. An official selection of the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, WHICH WAY IS THE FRONT LINE FROM HERE? debuts on HBO on April 18, 2013. The film screened just three years after “Restrepo” was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in documentary competition. Hetherington and Junger spent a year embedded in Afghanistan with an American platoon in “Restrepo,” which was 2 nominated for an Academy Award® for Best Documentary Feature the following year. Less than an hour after hearing rumors that Tim Hetherington had been wounded in Libya, Sebastian Junger received confirmation on Twitter that he had been killed, along with Getty photographer Chris Hondros. When a number of journalists who’d been present at the mortar attack came to New York for Hetherington’s memorial service, Junger interviewed them in an attempt to understand his friend’s tragic death. Suddenly he found himself making a documentary. “Tim worked as a visual artist,” says director Junger, “and after his death, a film seemed like the most appropriate way to honor him. Tim was very brave not only in combat — I have been under fire with him many times — but in life. The artistic choices he made were incredibly risky, but he was very sure of himself and wound up completely reinventing his craft. The title of my film, WHICH WAY IS THE FRONT LINE FROM HERE?, refers as much to Tim’s artistic instincts as to any combat situation he may have been in.” Only 40 when he died, British-born, Brooklyn-based Hetherington documented the experience of war from the perspective of the individual, mostly in West Africa and the Middle East. His stunning photographic work, whether of child soldiers on the frontlines or intimate portraits of sleeping American servicemen in a combat outpost, earned him several major awards, including four World Press prizes. In 2007 he published “Liberia Bit by Bit: Long Story Retold,” three years after working as cinematographer on the documentary “Liberia: An Uncivil War.” He later published “Infidel,” a book of his photographs from “Restrepo.” Hetherington had a brilliant visual mind, but he was defined just as much for his compassion and humanitarianism. “I become deeply embedded emotionally in all the work I do,” he once said. Through his photographs and films, he gave us new ways to look at and think about human suffering. In spite of the settings in which he worked, Hetherington did not consider himself just a combat reporter. While he’d risen to prominence covering war zones, his ultimate value as an artist lay in his ability to integrate multiple media 3 formats and forge a sympathy with his subjects. This allowed him a huge amount of artistic freedom to explore the nature of war — what it was, not just how it presented itself. In Liberia, for example, he probed how young soldiers self- consciously imitate what they have seen in the mass media to determine how they should act. In Afghanistan, he explored how remote and hostile terrain could be transformed, through soldiers’ camaraderie, into a strange form of “Man Eden.” To cover the dramatic arc of Hetherington’s inspirational career leading up to his final day in Misrata, Sebastian Junger draws upon a wealth of visual material that Hetherington left behind, from his brilliant archive of still images, to visceral video footage from the world’s battlegrounds, to excerpts from his short film “Diary,” a hallucinatory trip through his war-addled mind as he tries to integrate his experiences overseas with his life at home. Included also are moving interviews with his family, friends and colleagues, including photojournalist James Brabazon (one of the film’s producers), who recount Hetherington’s unique perspective and compassionate spirit. Sebastian Junger is a New York-based writer, journalist and filmmaker. “Restrepo” marked his film debut. Junger’s accompanying book, “War,” spent over a month on the New York Times bestseller list; his other books include “The Perfect Storm,” “Fire” and “A Death in Belmont.” Junger first reported from Afghanistan in 1996 and, four years later, was one of the last Westerners to accompany legendary guerrilla fighter Ahmed Shah Massoud during his war against the Taliban. Junger has reported for Vanity Fair magazine, where he is a contributing editor, from many war zones across the world. He was trapped in Monrovia during the Liberian civil war in 2003, caught in Sierra Leone during the civil war of 2000, and very briefly held by “oil rebels” in the Niger Delta in 2006. “The Forensics of War,” his October 1999 article in Vanity Fair, won a National Magazine Award for Reporting. In 2012, in response to learning the news that Tim Hetherington could have possibly been saved from bleeding to death if someone with the proper training had attended to him, Sebastian Junger started a program called RISC (Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues, http://www.risctraining.org). The organization 4 provides free emergency medical training to freelance journalists so that they may be able to save lives in the battlefield. During the 2013 Sundance Film Festival, the Julie Nester Gallery will present an exhibition of photographs by Tim Hetherington. Opening Jan. 17, the exhibition will consist of photographs taken in Liberia and Afghanistan and will be on view through Jan. 30th. The gallery is located at 1280 Iron Horse Drive, Park City, Utah. The April HBO debut of WHICH WAY IS THE FRONT LINE FROM HERE? coincides with the publication of “Here I Am: The Story of Tim Hetherington, War Photographer” (Grove Press), a compelling portrait of the photojournalist by journalist and writer Alan Huffman. The family of Tim Hetherington has gifted The Estate of Tim Hetherington to The Tim Hetherington Charitable Trust. The Trust will use all proceeds from Hetherington’s photographs, exhibitions, books and films for humanitarian causes. Visit timhetherington.org for more information. WHICH WAY IS THE FRONT LINE FROM HERE? THE LIFE AND TIME OF TIM HETHERINGTON is an HBO Documentary Films presentation; A Goldcrest Films Production; directed by Sebastian Junger; produced by Nick Quested and James Brabazon; field photography by James Brabazon, Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger; edited by Geeta Gandbhir and Maya Mumma; supervising editor, Geeta Gandbhir; original music by Joel Goodman; co-produced by Gretchen McGowan. For HBO: supervising producer, Sara Bernstein; executive producer, Sheila Nevins. 5 HBO DOCUMENTARY FILMS WHICH WAY IS THE FRONT LINE FROM HERE? THE LIFE AND TIME OF TIM HETHERINGTON DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT I got the phone call late on the morning of April 20, 2011: My good friend and colleague, Tim Hetherington, was rumored to have been wounded in Libya. He and I had been slated to go there together to cover the civil war, but at the last moment I’d had to pull out, and Tim went on his own. I desperately started searching the Internet for any news of him and quickly confirmed on Twitter that he’d been killed in a mortar attack less than an hour earlier. Just like that, Tim was gone. In an attempt to understand what had happened to him, I interviewed journalists who’d been there during the attack when they came to New York for Tim’s memorial. Suddenly I was making a film. Tim had documented his last day of life extensively with a video camera, and that material became the beginning of WHICH WAY IS THE FRONT LINE FROM HERE? Journalists are dying with greater and greater frequency in war zones, and their deaths are better and better documented because everyone, it seems — including rebel fighters — carries small video cameras. The well-recorded tragedy of my friend’s death, I thought, might be able to inform other journalists and the general public about the risks of the job.