On the front line: a documentary tribute to Tim Hetherington

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/jan/29/documentary-tim-hetherington-war-photographer

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Three years ago, I had a beer at Sundance with the war documentarian Tim Hetherington. He was celebrating the grand jury award he had won for Restrepo, in which he covered a year in the life of US soldiers in Afghanistan. Last weekend, I sat in the same bar with his close friend and colleague Sebastian Junger, who was screening his new film about Hetherington's life, and untimely death, aged 40.

The first part of the film's title, Which Way is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington, is a line we hear Hetherington speak, in Misrata, Libya, on 20 April 2011, hours before pro-Gaddafi forces fired a mortar that struck and killed him, ending the career of one of the world's most impactful visual artists. At the heart of Junger's loving but unsentimental film is a tribute to Hetherington's extraordinary work. He was not a traditional war photographer, nor documentary film-maker. He called himself an "image-maker" as that enabled him to work across visual media, from mobile phone downloads to multimedia installations.

Trained at Cardiff, he began his career in Liberia, documenting the impact of war on real people, and working as an investigator and teacher. In his photography, he depicted violent graffiti as the scars of war, and developed a longstanding fascination for how young men became enamoured with war. Always digging far beneath the surface, Hetherington was fascinated with how war created powerful bonds between men, and created an addictive normality of its own, making any return home a traumatic problem. This paradox was illustrated in his own life, as shown in his video project, Diary, intercut between his experiences on the front line, and his alienated time in England.

From his images of a Sri Lankan cemetery to those of Liberian footballers and sleeping American soldiers on the Afghan frontline, intimacy and engagement at the forefront of his worldview. He used a square-framed Hasselblad camera, which required him to look down, rather than directly at the subject. That let him see a different, more meditative dimension to the people and situations he memorialised.

Newspapers around the world, including this one, published his images, which often had historical value. He took the only shot that proved that Liberian rebel fighters used mortars to attack government forces in the capital, Monrovia. His impact was interpersonal too, as shown in footage of him negotiating with a Liberian rebel leader to save the life of a doctor suspected of being a government informant.

To deepen our insight into Hetherington, Junger shot candid interviews with those who knew him best. There is huge pathos in hearing his girlfriend, Somali-American filmmaker Idil Ibramim, talk of how she had been planning to start a family with the man she called "the Timinator". Painful, too, was watching his stoical father, Alastair Hetherington, describe how he had had a premonition about his son going to Misrata, and begged him not to go.

"I had a very bad feeling, too," Junger told me, "The only way to Misrata was by boat. Gaddafi had a navy, and didn't want the press broadcasting his atrocities. I warned Tim that Gaddafi would start sinking boats. How are you going to get out, I asked him?"

The portrait of Hetherington is completed by interviews with the man himself, most of them conducted after Restrepo was nominated for the 2011 Oscars, which he attended with Ibrahim just two months before his death. "I want to document real people in extreme circumstances," he says.

The film reveals the deadly perils Hetherington underwent. Former Liberian president Charles Taylor once dispatched two hit squads to assassinate him. Visceral video footage that he shot on the day of his own death shows an infernal world of flaming tyres and random firing of automatic weapons.

The film gives an insight into why Hetherington would put himself in harm's way. "I risk my life both for personal reasons and for objective truth," he said. Says Junger: "When Tim got to Libya, he saw Sarajevo all over again. He saw Monrovia again. A moral imperative kicked in."

But why did Hetherington get so reckless that day in Misrata, when he went ahead of the rebel forces? "Tim was generally cautious," Junger said, "but this time he got so intoxicated by the drama that he acted without good judgment. There's something transcendent about combat. You get sucked into it. It's a drug you take that makes you feel potent. The irony is that he wasn't killed inside the building that you see in the film, where people are playing catch with hand grenades. He went back to that area in the afternoon and was killed by a single mortar on an otherwise quiet afternoon."

Junger says part of his own motivation for making the film was educational. "I hope that my friend's death might be able to inform other journalists and the general public about the risks of the job." When I asked him whether there was a danger that his heroic story might glamorise the job, Junger replied: "We show Tim lying dead in the hospital, having his chest compressed. There's not much glamour there."

A portrait emerges of a man with an ability to engage immediately with a wide range of people on an intimate level. That helped gain the trust of his photographic subjects, and inspired love and loyalty in those who knew him personally.

There's another motive behind the film for Junger, who stopped war reporting the day Hetherington died. "The shrapnel wound was not necessarily fatal," Junger told me. "He was loaded into a van alive, but he bled out, and 10 minutes later he was dead. If someone with basic medical training had been there, he might have stopped the bleeding and saved his life. But almost no war journalist has this training."

This realisation led Junger to set up a non-profit organisation called RISC – Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues – to provide freelances with the know-how to stop blood loss and clear blocked air passages. The programme began last year in New York and already has a long waiting list. Junger now hopes to expand operations to London and Istanbul. Taking this film on the festival circuit is another way to raise funds, as well as an important memorial of unique talent.