Tag: Matthew Heineman

A Private War

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

This is the story of the last decade or so of Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin from just before she lost an eye to enemy fire in Sri Lanka in 2001 to her death in an explosive blast in Homs in 2012. Recent events since the film’s completion suggest that she was deliberately targeted and murdered by the Syrian forces.

Director Heineman is a documentary film maker of some considerable repute having made City Of Ghosts (2017) , Cartel Land (2015) and Our Time (2012) and he graduates to feature films here. You can see the attraction of the biographical subject for someone with that background. Judging by the excellent documentary about her Under The Wire (Chris Martin, 2018), Marie was not only something of a force of nature but also an extremely difficult woman to work with and at the same time someone who absolutely refused to play by the accepted rules of the game. She got herself in to inaccessible places and got information out to the world about what was happening in them.

Our review of Under The Wire suggested Colvin as a perfect subject for a feature adaptation and that “more psychological rigour would’ve deepened the story”, something A Private War has gone for in no uncertain terms and which does indeed lend it some extra gravitas in certain parts. That review further suggested that there could have been greater emphasis on why journalists go to such lengths in order to tell their stories, in which regard alas the current film doesn’t do quite so well.

As the narrative approaches Marie’s death, the list of places from which she reports plays out like a countdown: Marzak, Afghanistan 2009, Misrata, Libya, 2011, Homs, Syria 2012. Yet, in the end, the script doesn’t quite get under why Colvin pursued the career that she did. Addiction to constantly putting herself in danger is mentioned, but never really explored at length. Maybe Heineman should have looked at the wonderfully dirty Salvador (Oliver Stone, 1986) with its secondary cameraman character (Jon Savage) who’ll do anything to capture that perfect, photographic news shot. We don’t quite get that sense or anything like it here.

Nevertheless, Rosamund Pike is fantastic as the hard-bitten, globetrotting, one-eyed newshound who won’t take any nonsense from anyone. And there are some amazing transition scenes such as entering her London home, finding the interior covered with a mixture of flaking plaster and camouflage netting as her mind descends into the stuff nightmares derived from in the field traumas. More of this sort of material would have served the piece well.

Instead the script tries for historicity but trips up via an over-reliance on stereotypes. Its supporting character thumbnail of cameraman Paul Conroy (Jamie Dornan) works well enough as the recording eyes to Colvin’s own descriptive prose, but her London editor Sean Ryan (Tom Hollander) feels like a cliché as he tells her that everyone’s behind her, there’ll always be a place for her at the paper and so on.

A new girl called Kate (Faye Marsay) control alt delete’s Marie’s crashed computer back into working again in the office, turns up a couple of times abroad then mysteriously fades away from the narrative. A seasoned fellow reporter called Norm seems to exist for no other reason than for his later death under fire to shock us.

And then there’s the drama’s opening/closing shot, a spectacular and highly detailed crane up from the ground to reveal a panorama of Syria’s war-ravaged city of Homs in ill-advisedly minute, computer generated detail which both dominates and sits uneasily alongside everything else in a film which never approaches this clearly very expensive shot’s sense of devastated landscape.

The subject matter is still pretty strong stuff and moments like Colvin’s interviewing Yasser Arafat and seeing his dead body not long afterwards certainly deliver. When she broadcasts live to the world from a building in the middle of besieged Homs the scene can’t really fail to inspire because it was such a brave and amazing thing to do in real life and its representation here does it justice.

Elsewhere, though, you wish the film would go hell for leather into the mind of this extraordinary woman but it never quite does: the whole should somehow have added up to a much greater sum of its parts. Little bits of voice over and brief footage of the real life Marie Colvin herself talking at the end suggest what might have been. A Private War pales beside such dirtylicious films about war correspondents as The Killing Fields (Roland Joffé, 1984) or the aforementioned Salvador. It’s good, but it ought somehow to have been better.

A Private War is out in the UK on Friday, February 15th. On VoD on Monday, June 10th.

City of Ghosts

Posted on by victorfraga

A[/dropcap/s often is the case when it comes to documenting wars and conflicts around the world, the reality is sometimes far more shocking than any documentarian is able convey. Violent images from the forefront of Isil’s devastating hold over the city of Raqqa in Syria are replayed to audiences around the world, daily. From public beheadings and executions at gunpoint to the reckless destruction of ancient artifacts, no one could have ever imagined that the people of one of the most ancient countries in the Middle East would suffer this greatly at the hands of a small yet determined groups of fanatics.

In City Of Ghosts, Academy Award winning director Matthew Heineman (Cartel Land, 2015), takes on the plight of a group of men fighting to have the cries of their once great city heard. In this shocking yet essential movie, Heineman follows the journey of the members of a group calling themselves “Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently”. This small coalition of anonymous-activists-turned-citizen-journalists managed to put themselves in the firing line by bravely exposing the barbarism of Islamic State. With intel from inside the occupied city, the men managed to run a website documenting what took place after a vacuum of power resulted in the occupation of Raqqa by Isil for years.

Offered incredible access to the men and, in some cases, their own family members, Heineman deftly allows his subjects to tell their own stories without injecting himself too much into their narrative. Stories of violence and murder coming out of the city are neither sanitised nor fetishised by the director. Using Isil’s own footage found online, the director allows his subjects to talk about the unimaginable ordeal they went through since the moment they started speaking out against their invaders.

From Aziz, co-founder and spokesman, who says he only got the job because his “english doesn’t suck too much”, to Hamoud who was once active in the early days of the Syrian revolution, the men speak of their frustration of seeing their own Arab Spring hijacked by a group of opportunists. Former Law School student Hassan, talks of the early days of the revolutionary movement which turned into a nightmare for him and his friends. While teacher turned reporter Mohamad found himself fleeing Raqqa when it became clear that he could no longer guarantee his own safety.

With a timely release after the liberation of Mosul last week, City Of Ghosts is likely to ignite interest in the stories behind the barbaric face of a rogue state which went on to destroy the lives of anyone that dared oppose it. As Heineman follows his subjects to Germany where they speak of their love for their homeland and the mixed reception they have had since moving to Europe, questions about what the future holds remain unanswered. Allowing those without a voice to put across their stories, will no doubt gain Heineman more accolades, but for all intents and purposes, it is his subjects who deserve every award and accolade just by remaining true to their mission to report the truth.

City of Ghosts is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, July 21st.

Click here for our review of the equally jarring and powerful Insyriated (Philippe van Leeuw), which is out in UK cinemas in September.