‘Love+War’ and ‘Cover-Up’ show us the human side of top journalists

After 20 years of being behind the camera, American war photographer Lynsey Addario turns to face the lens in Love+War, from Oscar-winning filmmaking duo Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. As a war photographer covering conflicts and humanitarian crises around the world—including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Ukraine—Addario is indefatigable in her quest to document the human cost of war, often at her own peril.

The documentary chronicles Addario’s career over the past two decades, book-ended by recent assignments in Ukraine. In the early days of the war in 2022, she took a photograph of a local family killed by mortar strike right in front of her eyes. The image landed on the front page of The New York Times, refuting Putin’s claims that the Russian military was not targeting civilians. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist has also documented life in Afghanistan both pre- and post-9/11, covered the Libyan civil war during the Arab Spring, and shed light on Sierra Leone’s high maternal mortality rates.

In the course of duty, Addario, 51, has been kidnapped twice—once in Iraq and again in Libya—but continues to return to the frontlines in service of something bigger than herself. Being caught in the crossfire of various conflicts has led her to inevitably question why she continues to do this work. Over time, she realized that her ability to access certain spaces where her male colleagues are not allowed affords her the unique opportunity to tell stories of the women and children who suffer as collateral damage in war, and it’s this sense of purpose that drives her.

Addario’s career is impressive and inspiring (and often nail-biting) but the real strength of Love+War is when it pushes past the professional into the personal. The filmmakers—and Addario herself—don’t gloss over the fact that her work frequently takes her away from her family, including two young children, and that the possibility of death always looms large. As a mother she’s often asked when she plans to retire from this life-threatening line of work for the sake of her kids. But Addario is clear-eyed about the risks she’s taking, and takes comfort in the fact that her children will still have a loving father (Paul de Bendern, a former Reuters journalist) should anything happen to her.

Addario may be a mother but she doesn’t treat it like the most important job in the world, and it’s refreshing to see a working mom not offer the usual refrains about the challenges of a work-life balance, or guilt over not having it all. In a candid—and likely unpopular—admission, she says, “In my heart, all I want to be doing is shooting," adding that she feels “most present" when out on assignment. The film doesn’t shy away from showing the impact of Addario’s choices on her husband, kids, parents and sisters. But it also shows that her decision to continue working in conflict zones isn’t one that was taken lightly. The honesty and transparency Addario offers in the film is commendable, not least because women (particularly mothers) are rarely allowed to prioritize themselves or their careers without criticism from friends, strangers and the world at large.

Another journalist whose life and career have been inspirational to many is legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, subject of Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’s urgent documentary Cover-Up.

Hersh is the reason the world knows about the massacre of civilians in My Lai and other villages during the Vietnam War, the torture of Iraqi prisoners by US troops at Abu Ghraib, and the attempted cover-up of the Watergate break-in. The investigative journalist, now 88 years old, is regarded (and feared) as a formidable figure in American media for his penchant to dig up stories that powerful people want to keep hidden.

Hersh is very much an old-school investigative reporter—he asks a lot of questions, follows leads, cultivates sources, and reads between the lines to sniff out what’s not being said. In his early days covering the Pentagon in the 1960s, he was known to wander the halls to pick up information rather than dutifully report what was said in official press briefings. He even gave out his phone number once on a radio show, which is how he got an anonymous call tipping him off about the torture at Abu Ghraib. Finding and telling the stories that aren’t being told—or rather, are actively being suppressed—is Hersh’s specialty, and in the documentary he bemoans the fact that not enough journalists are doing the same.

Poitras, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Citizenfour and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, has been pursuing Hersh for 20 years. He finally relented to be the subject of this film, likely convinced by the involvement of Obenhaus, whom he previously worked with on three investigative documentaries. But he’s still not entirely sure he wants to be there at all and makes no qualms about hiding his reservations, particularly when the topic of confidential sources comes up. “It’s hard to know who to trust. I barely trust you guys," he says to them at one point.

The film offers us Hersh in all his glory—his prickliness, his combativeness, his wit, his vigour, his intelligence. His stubborn, no-nonsense nature and strong moral centre shine through, and it’s easy to see how this man built a career out of speaking truth to power. Like many independent journalists around the world, Hersh has recently found a home on Substack, where the logline for his newsletter is, fittingly, “It’s worse than you think."

Through the lens of Hersh’s work, the filmmakers are able to paint a damning picture of decades of American government and military malfeasance and moral corruption, drawing a throughline from the Vietnam War to the atrocities being committed today in Palestine. Interspersed throughout the film are snippets of Hersh speaking with an anonymous source in Gaza, who called him with proof that the Israeli Defence Forces were systematically targeting and killing civilians. This interweaving of the past and present crimes of the American empire makes Cover-Up essential viewing for our times.

What both Addario and Hersh demonstrate in this pair of documentaries is their empathy. Their job may be to document and relay the worst crimes and atrocities to the world but that doesn’t mean they don’t despair at the suffering of others or that they’re unmoved by oppression and injustice. Both tear up at various points when talking about the stories they felt compelled to cover. Journalists can be neutral but that doesn’t mean they’re not human.

Pahull Bains is a freelance film critic and culture writer based in Toronto.