Bearing Witness
New York Premiere

Bearing Witness

| USA | 90 MINUTES | English, Arabic

Bob Eisenhardt, Barbara Kopple, and Marijana Wotton have crafted a brutally honest, sometimes graphic video diary which documents the lives of five female career war reporters. It explores the grisly heights of the daily life threatening risks, the on-call demands of the job, and reexamines the choices of career versus family. The self-professed "war junkies" of Bearing Witness, who are all currently covering the war in Iraq, have each collected their own private and traumatic war stories. May Ying Welsh, a producer at Al Jazeera TV and self-described "American in love with Baghdad" experiences the bombing of her hotel during the course of this documentary. A camerawoman for CNN, Mary Rogers, recounts covering an uprising in Sierra Leone that ended with her being in the middle of gun battle and her colleagues being killed in an ambush only days later. Then there's Molly Bingham, a photographer who went from covering the war in Iraq, to becoming the story when she was arrested and locked in the city's infamous Abu Ghraib prison. But perhaps Marie Colvin, senior foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, has suffered the most personal injury of the quintet because her wound is so evident: the eye-patch wearing Colvin shares how she nearly died from a grenade attack that resulted in the loss of an eye. Finally, Janine DiGiovanni, a foreign correspondent for UK's The Times, who juggles an international courtship that blossoms into marriage, faces a whole new quandary: Can a pregnant reporter really cover a war?

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