— THE OUTSIDERS: MARTHA GELLHORN JOHN PILGER, ALAN LOWERY THE POWER OF THE DOCUMENTARY: BREAKING THE SILENCE thepowerofthedocumentary.com.au A FILM FESTIVAL CURATED BY JOHN PILGER The Outsiders: Martha Gellhorn — Presenter: Sound: John Pilger has always considered She reported the Spanish Civil War from She tells Pilger she still has hope. ‘I think John Pilger Bob Withey himself an ‘outsider’ – that is, a journalist the defeated Republican side, whose the world is just as awful as it can be at Director: Film editor: who believes ‘received wisdoms’ should cause she embraced, and later saw front- any given moment,’ she says. ‘There will Alan Lowery Jonathan Morris be questioned. In 1983, Britain's newly line action in China, Finland, the Second always be a certain number of people Production company: Recommended rating: launched Channel 4 broadcast nine face- World War, Vietnam and El Salvador. fighting like hell from keeping it being Tempest Films PG to-face interviews by Pilger entitled unbearably worse.’ Producer: Colour, 26 mins The Outsiders. Her first successful book, The Trouble Jacky Stoller UK, 1983 I’ve Seen, was based on her experience In her 70s, she reported the US invasion Researcher: In deciding on his subjects, Pilger chose as a field investigator for President of Panama and was so appalled by Mike Coren ‘those who have challenged orthodox Franklin Roosevelt's Federal Emergency the loss of civilian life that she flew to Camera: ideas that lead us in the same direction’ Relief Administration during the Great Washington and confronted a general Rik Stratton – and added a rider: he or she must have Depression of the 1930s. She tells Pilger at a Pentagon press briefing. In her 80s, demonstrated the courage of his or that she was sacked after inciting a she wrote movingly about Brazil's her convictions. group of unemployed men to break the street children. windows of a relief office in Idaho to ‘get No one fitted this description more the attention of authority’. She and Pilger became close friends than Martha Gellhorn, one of the great and when she died in 1998, aged 89, he witnesses of the 20th century. She was The Spanish Civil War left a deep and other ‘cronies’ initiated the Martha also the inspiration for Pilger’s early impression on Gellhorn. Asked by Pilger Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, which reporting on the Vietnam War. In a for her lasting memory, she replies, is today a prestigious award given to famous series of dispatches from Saigon ‘The enormous bravery of the people, journalists who ‘reach behind the facade in 1967, she described the American absolutely unbelievable bravery under of propaganda and expose, in Martha invasion as ‘a new kind of war... a war on appalling conditions.’ It was in Spain that Gellhorn's words, “official drivel”’. civilians’. In The Outsiders, Gellhorn tells she met Ernest Hemingway and became Pilger she regarded the entire war as ‘an his third wife. Anthony Hayward act of criminal stupidity’. Journalist and author At the end of the Second World War, The daughter of a suffragette and Gellhorn entered Dachau on the day a distinguished medical specialist, of liberation. Reporting this, the first Gellhorn was, says Pilger in his German concentration camp, had been introduction, the world’s first accredited her personal war aim. ‘It was a total female war correspondent, who and absolute horror, and all I did was invariably wrote from the point of view report it as it was,’ she says. ‘I got out of the victims of war. She called this of Dachau in a state bordering on ‘the view from the ground’. uncontrolled hysteria.’ .