We can't know about the horrors of the world unless someone documents them, but the people who are willing to do that are so far out of my frame of reference that I've always had to regard them with a bewildered fascination. We owe an enormous and probably unpayable debt to those journalists who will put themselves right in the middle of what may well be the means of their own deaths.
They're people I'll never personally understand, and it appears Margaret Moth was someone even other war journalists had trouble understanding. Which is to say, she was so dedicated to the work and to the people involved that even those doing the same thing marveled at her. For decades, Moth was a camerawoman in war zones and the documentary Never Look Away tells her story through Moth's own footage and interviews with people who knew and loved her. And while I can't say I came away with a complete understanding of her—although how could I—we do get a dedicated and engrossing portrait of a woman who simply overwhelmed the world around her.
For those like me who weren’t familiar with Moth's story, I won't spoil the events of her life here, to the extent we even know them, but director Lucy Lawless—yes, that Lucy Lawless—does a fantastic job moving the film along as she takes us through Moth's days getting started in the business, through her most harrowing times, and to the end, as told to us by her colleagues and her lovers, all people who appreciated the woman's complexity and drive, even if it baffled them, too. Moth’s own footage is unsurprisingly tense and gripping, showing devastation in Bosnia and Iraq, but not just showing us bombed-out buildings— Moth was deeply interested in the people affected by all of this misery, and she made incredible efforts to get their faces on camera, to show the people experiencing what can often otherwise be turned into action-movie scenes. There are other people who do what Margaret Moth did, but it's clear that Moth was a person unlike any other.
Never Look Away is on VOD November 22nd.
