Love + War

The Oscar winning team behind adrenaline-doc, Free Solo (2018), return with a no-holds barred look into the life of Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist and conflict photographer, Lynsey Addario, as she wrestles with decisions between her family and her life’s work, knowing that whichever one she chooses in the moment, she will always be leaving something that she loves behind.

 

For more than two decades, Lynsey Addario has been getting herself into some tough situations; running headlong into warzones, humanitarian crises, and regions of oppression, to record and photograph it all for The New York Times and others. She never thought she would have kids, in fact so sure was she about not having a family of her own, that she asked her father to provide her with the $10,000 dowry that he afforded each of her sisters on their wedding days, so that she could go out and buy a whole bunch of camera equipment and just get her career started instead. Cut to today, however, and here Lynsey is explaining to the National Geographic crew just how difficult it is to hold down a family at home, whilst still trying to get the truth out to people about how bad it is in some of the most horrible and terrifying places on Earth.

 

Lynsey’s passion is obvious, and that is a great hook for directors, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, as she leads us through some of the most difficult and hostile terrain on the planet. Instantly likeable, and eminently relatable at every ‘fuck’, ‘shit’, and ‘maybe we shouldn’t be here’, that follows the spraying of bullets or the blast of a nearby mortar, Lynsey is busy getting the scoop on the frontlines of the Ukrainian War, just the latest in a long line of warzones that she has reported from in her career. This current war becomes the linchpin for Lynsey’s journey of Love + War, as we watch her document other people’s troubles and tell their stories of loss, all the while reminiscing over and taking the time to acknowledge her own.

 

Over a long, varied, and illustrious career, Lynsey has been in just about every conflict zone imaginable, from India and Pakistan, to Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Ethiopia, Palestine, and Libya, where she was abducted along with three colleagues by Colonel Gaddafi’s regime in 2011. She has won two Pulitzer Prizes for her work, had it seen the world over in some of the most reputable publications on the planet, had it presented in the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, and has the knowledge of her photographs having directly mobilised change on the ground for those she has encountered, but yet she knows there is still work to do. And every time that she makes the decision to fly away and tell someone else’s story, she must fight with herself about the stories she’s missing at home, those she could be making with her loved ones.

 

For a lot of the documentary we stay at home with husband, Paul de Bendern, and the kids, Lukas and Alfred, to see just the kind of Love Lynsey has while she is there, as well as what she misses out on when she’s not. This is a very candid portrait of home life, very delicately taken by cinematographer, Thorsten Thielow, that captures the essence of Lynsey’s struggle about what she leaves behind every time she gets up to go to work. The comfortable, homely, intimate, Love sections of the film then become even more emotionally relevant when we move to the horrors of War, and we see what Lynsey sees on a daily basis when she’s not at home.

 

With an obvious mountain of footage at their disposal, Vasarhelyi and Chin do a great job of leading us through the turning points of Addario’s career, when her photographs had the most impact. To witness these events, and see these people, as she saw them, sometimes to witness them alongside her, is as visceral as it is affecting for the viewer. You have to be willing to go to some pretty difficult places with Lynsey, especially those places where women are left, dumped, or discarded by the ravages of war, but understanding her need to document the truth of these situations is very easy when you’re there with her, seeing through her lens, looking straight at what so few genuinely get to see, and what so many others would rather hide.

 

The crux of Love + War is the pull of the two drives which exist inside of Lynsey Addario, and if there can be any reconciliation between them. As a mother, and a woman, she is persistently hounded by questions of love and loyalty to her children, while the men are let go to put themselves at risk as they see fit. There is a double-standard at play which feeds into Addario’s work, as she moves freely amongst women-only spaces and gains access to areas that no man with a camera could ever go. To ask if the pull between Love + War is more pertinent to Lynsey Addario as a woman photojournalist and conflict photographer, is to miss the point of the film, and probably a lot of her work, because it assumes a stronger pull in one direction. The quiet take-away from Lynsey’s story is that the pull of War is so strong. So strong that it pulls her away from the things that she Loves, and that she has fought to have even after she thought she’d never have them.

 

While new stories and films of modern female journalists are becoming more prominent and more popular, whether that be dramatised in Lee (2023), or fictionalised in Civil War (2024), there’s no substitute for the real thing, and that is exactly what Love + War provides. Lynsey Addario is the very definition of what makes journalism, especially in today’s world, so important, as she throws herself headlong into the fray to show us what it’s really like on the frontlines of our Earth. To understand the sacrifices she makes in order to bring us these truths is a privilege that shouldn’t be overlooked, and as someone who lives her life through one end of a lens, she is very open and honest with us when the camera is turned on her. For that, Love + War stands as a testament to modern photojournalism, with Lynsey Addario perhaps as a reluctant, accidental poster girl for the work that is done today to bring us our news.

 

If you want to know if it was all worth it, National Geographic is releasing Love + War in UK and Ireland theatres on Friday 24th October.