War films
Afghani children held hostage in the drug trade
By Nishat Ahmed Children pay the heaviest price for Afghanistan’s drugs trade – according to a powerful account by journalist Najibullah Quraishi and producer Jamie Doran in their documentary Opium Brides. Opening to a packed screening at the Frontline Club on Friday 7 March, the film exposed the failure of the Afghan government and its […]
Frontline: reporting from the world’s deadliest places
A newly revised and updated edition of Frontline by David Loyn was published this week. The acclaimed book chronicles the work of the Frontline news agency, founded by journalists Rory Peck, Peter Jouvenal, Vaughan Smith and Nicholas Della Casa. First published in 2005, the latest edition features a foreword from BBC world affairs editor John […]
Burma VJ
Burma VJ is a documentary film by Danish director Anders Østergaard about the Burmese reporters who risked their lives covering the Saffron revolution in Burma in September 2007. Østergaard assembled the film almost entirely from handheld footage shot during the protests. A journalist, using the pseudonym Joshua and with the Democratic Voice of Burma, who […]
Reporter
Reporter is a film about the work of New York Times foreign correspondent Nicholas Kristof. The film, produced by Ben Affleck, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival last week, “As journalism of all kinds becomes more desperate to make money, then there is a tendency to focus more on celebrity,” Kristof said in a telephone […]
Micahel J. Kavanagh and Taylor Krauss reporting from Congo
Michael J. Kavanagh, from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, reports from a refugee camp in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo with footage from cameraman Taylor Krauss. Earlier today we blogged how the two got caught up with the secret police in the DRC. You can read the full story on the World Focus website, […]
Abdullah Farah Duguf wins FPA award for Somalia film
Abdullah Farah Duguf won the prestigious TV News Story of the Year at the Foreign Press Association Awards in London last night. Duguf’s colleagues at Channel 4, Ben de Pear and Nima Elbagir, were also there to pick up the award, De Pear said: “He sent back via DHL five or six tapes which were […]
In search of the Taliban
John D. McHugh’s latest multimedia report for the Guardian finds him in Logar province with the US-Afghan mission in search of the Taliban. A US army captain, with a price on his red head, gives his views on the challenges they face. John also has an audio slideshow up on The Guardian, The Seray combat […]
Vaughan Smith up for Rory Peck Award
[video:google:8548112614184247543&ei] The shortlist for the Rory Peck Awards 2008 is now out. Among the contenders in the “Features”category is Frontline Club Founder Vaughan Smith for the blog he wrote from Afghanistan in 2007. You can see the edited footage he put together for BBC Newsnight in the video above. Good luck Vaughan. Here is a […]
Ben Anderson on 24 hours in Helmand
[video:liveleak:89a_1223425254] Ben Anderson talks about his BBC reports from Helmand province in Afghanistan with VBS TV. Part 1 is above and here’s more on the series, “This series is about 24 hours in Helmand, Afghanistan’s most violent province. More..I was with the Queen’s Company, British soldiers who normally guard Buckingham Palace. Their job was to […]
Ugly of war
John D. McHugh, Frontline Club member and regular in these parts, has his latest short film from Afghanistan up on The Guardian website. He to a member of a the US army Medevac team about the day to day job of helping the wounded and the dying. John says he has a lot more footage […]
Blood Trail – the trailer
[video:youtube:FOeHVsuGzx8] Richard Parry and Vaughan Smith, both original Frontline TV Agency men and Vaughan is of course the founder of the Frontline Club, give us a sneak preview of the trailer to their film Blood Trail. The film was 15 years in the making and follows the career of war photographer Robert King. Richard, the […]
Crossing the frontline
[video:youtube:wmGl5FACJ2o] This dramatic footage purports to show journalists crossing the frontline in Georgia because… well, it doesn’t look as if there is anywhere else to go.
How things used to be
[video:youtube:9aF_r_01ekY] In this video blog, NBC’s Mike Taibbi talks to John Rich, the only war correspondent to cover the entire Korean War. link
Blood Trail to Toronto Film Festival 2008
Blood Trail is the result of fifteen years of filming one man in war zones across the world. It’s been a labour of love for Frontline Club founder Vaughan Smith and original Frontline TV agency cameraman Richard Parry since they first met wannabe photographer Robert King in Bosnia in the early 90s. The film will […]
The Fixer gets Tribeca funding
The Fixer, a film by Ian Olds, is one of seven documentary film projects to recieve funding from the Tribeca Film Institute‘s inaugural Gucci Tribeca Documentary Finishing Fund. Each project will receive $80,000 to help towards post production costs. The Fixer focuses on the relationship between Afghan translator, Ajmal Naqshbandi, and the war reporter Christian […]
Forgotten film season at the Frontline Club
The Forgotten season starts at the Frontline Club from 4 August. The season consists of nine documentary films from some of the world’s forgotten stories, Ranging from female soldiers in Sri Lanka to a forgotten war in Nagorno Karabakh, a covered up massacre in Uzbekistan to conscientious objection in the US Army – these films […]
Gonzo
[video:youtube:QT2c3lwidkw] Alex Gibney talks to the BBCs Tom Brook about his latest film Gonzo which portrays the life of the original gonzo journalist and foreign correspndent Hunter S. Thompson
15 months of reporting
[video:youtube:N3_ZKBwv3V0] Mike Boettcher, ex-CNN, NBC, Peabody award winning journalist, is heading to Iraq and Afghanistan to report on the soldier’s stories. He’ll be out there for 15 months and will file all his work to the web on a site called NoIgnoring. He says he’ll make all the material free for news networks to use […]
Navigating the counterinsurgency field manual
John D. McHugh’s latest film for The Guardian is up. This is his fourth piece and we find John talking to Charlie Company in Afghanistan about what it’s really like to work as an American soldier trying to follow the guidance in the Counterinsurgency Field Manual Click the image above to watch John’s film.
Shooting the messenger
Shooting the Messenger, Al Jazeera’s documentary on the deliberate killing and intimidation of journalists in conflict zones, investigates how international reporters became targets. In the past, members of the media were considered to be neutral in time of war. They were much like paramedics in the sense that their main concern was not victory, but […]
Pilger scoops media award
[video:youtube:to6uNUTf8g4] John Pilger’s War on Democracy fought off competition from the BBC Storyville documentaries Taxi to the Dark Side and Please Vote for Me to take the award for best TV Documentary at last night’s One World Media Awards. link
Films from the frontline
John D. McHugh’s latest video report from Afghanistan is live on The Guardian website. John also has another film, “Captain McChrystal’s Thanksgiving” and a new audio slideshow called “Not fit for task” up on the site too. Both are part of a “flash” presentation. John dropped me an email to say he’s working hard on […]
Ziv Koren and the finger camera
Annaliza Savage, Wired.com’s multimedia editor, writes about how photographer Ziv Koren used a “finger camera” on top of his camera while photographing conflict zones. Film director Solo Avital later used a mix of stills and video to produce the More than 1000 Words documentary, In order to film Koren on the West Bank, Gaza and […]
Sean Smith “nothing very original”
Photographer Sean Smith is profiled in the Press Gazette today. Sean used video and stills photography in Iraq to report for the Guardian newspaper and he talked about his pictures at the Frontline Club in February soon after winning his Press Photographer of the year award. He talks about his no-nonsense apporach and the importance […]
Making a one man documentary
Filmmaker Matt Clift talks about how he went about making a one man documentary film about an orphanage in Uganda in 2007. He details the problems he had, the equipment he used and offers a number of tips for wannabe filmmakers working in difficult environments, Where I was going there was no option for going […]
“The ultimate reality show”
Hollywood agent turned war reporter Pat Dollard attempts to put the record straight in The Guardian today. Tony Scott, director of Top Gun, is working with Dollard to put together a TV series from the 700+ hours of film he returned from Iraq with. Dollard’s unconventional, drug fuelled style appealed to movie maker Scott who […]
Colin Farrell on the fictitious frontline
A series of slides from the production set of Triage – a film about the psychological toll of reporting the Bosnian war on a photographer played by Colin Farrell. The film is due for release in 2009. More on the screenplay at Javno.
Bush’s War
The PBS Frontline TV show puts online the two part documentary called Bush’s War. The vast multimedia report includes over 400 interviews and 175 video clips. The Producer Michael Kirk answered questions online at the Washington Post, Our focus was the war about the war. We focused on the battleground between the forces that wanted […]
Talking with the Taliban
The Globe & Mail’s Graeme Smith puts together an in depth multimedia production called Talking with the Taliban for Canada’s biggest newspaper. The piece includes 42 unedited interviews with Taliban fighters all of whom were asked the same set of questions by a researcher the newspaper sent to talk with the Taliban. Here are the […]
Bearing Witness
Reuters and MediaStorm have partnered to produce a stunning multimedia production to mark the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq. It’s quite the mammoth undertaking with five chapters profiling three journalists with video, photography and snazzy graphics, The site features profiles of three Reuter’s journalists who have more than 23 years combined experience reporting […]