On the Ground

Once they were filming on location, however, every filmmaker honed in on the story and put their personal welfare on the back burner. Martinez’s co-director, photojournalist Scott Dalton, was out on a nighttime patrol when a sniper took aim. “Get down, gringo!” barked the paramilitary leader Dalton was filming, in a visceral sequence included in LA SIERRA.

Peled’s crew was arrested by Chinese officials and their gear and tapes confiscated on one harrowing occasion. The loss of that footage proved devastating, for without it Peled couldn’t convey the story of one of his main subjects and ultimately had to cut her out of CHINA BLUE. An incident that occurred when he was working on an earlier film about Israeli settlers in the West Bank, Inside God’s Bunker, underscores his priorities.

“I was in the middle of a shootout,” Peled remembers, “and you know what? I was delighted. My only concern at that moment was that my cameraman would keep on rolling rather than worry about his new camera. He just bought it and I was worried that he would run for shelter. I wasn’t thinking could I get hurt.”

Poitras was continually in danger in Iraq, needless to say. There’s a scene in MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY where she interviews the doctor’s family in their living room when a bomb goes off nearby, violently jolting the building and the camera. “By that time I’d been there long enough to have heard lots of explosions, and I knew I was in a concrete house, and I just kept filming,” she recalls. That’s not to say that Poitras was inattentive to her personal welfare. “In the beginning, I took risks that didn’t serve the story, and I stopped doing that,” she admits. “I was making that kind of assessment throughout: ‘I don’t need that shot; that’s not worth dying for.’”

Nonetheless, her primary concern had nothing to do with surviving Baghdad. “I would have left if I didn’t feel there was a story I wanted to tell or I didn’t think I could get it,” the New York-based filmmaker declares. “The times I was afraid were usually the times I had doubts whether I could come back with something that could communicate what I was seeing and feeling. When I stopped believing in the project, then I was very afraid.”

Peled’s sleepless nights also stem from nightmares of returning home empty-handed. “Once you start making a film there is this delicate dance between you and your subjects, where you both need each other in a way,” he explains. “And you as the filmmaker are always afraid that they could cut you off at some point, saying, ‘We’ve had enough of you around. Get lost. We don’t care that you have a contract to produce a film. Just get out of our lives.’ That is a much more real fear, and much more of a motivator of my behavior, than the other kind of fear that you’re talking about in terms of my body or my liberty being taken away.”

Worth the Cost

Since all the filmmakers survived without a scratch, the detached observer who did not chance life and limb may cavalierly salute the existence of these four remarkable documentaries as well worth the risks. Although the filmmakers are justifiably proud of their work, none sought the adrenaline rush or the glory that one typically associates with foreign correspondents. In fact, Margarita Martinez says self-effacingly, “I never thought about [the response to LA SIERRA] when we were filming because we didn't know that it was going to even be seen, so everything has been extra. But when I look back, I feel it was tough but it was worth it.”

Laura Poitras garnered an Oscar nomination for MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY, which is a rare honor. But, she suggests, that pales compared to the contributions of UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and humanitarian activist Marla Ruzicka, who were killed in Iraq. “You read those kinds of things and you think, on one hand it doesn’t make a difference,” Poitras says. “The film doesn’t change anything. On the other hand, it’s probably better to die and take risks that you believe in and hope that it does.”

Although Cal Skaggs has put his life on the line on numerous occasions, he places his documentary in the context of diligent media, an educated citizenry and a healthy republic. “I was obsessed with DEMOCRACY ON DEADLINE from late 2001 until it went on the air last fall because I think journalists around the world are about the bravest people there are in keeping societies open and free,” he declares. “Even when I was editing, the American press was being pretty damn lazy about the reasons for going to war [in Iraq], and it’s important to show how important gutsy journalists are to the society we want to keep.”

Although Skaggs wasn’t tooting his own horn by any means, those words fully apply to him and his fellow documentary makers. CHINA BLUE’s Micha Peled is even more aggressive in touting the importance of individuals willing to put their necks out there on our behalf.

“We live in a world where more and more information we should have is kept away from us,” Peled asserts. “Part of the process of globalization is that more and more areas of our daily life have been privatized. And once they are privatized, we don’t have access to the decision-making process. Corporations are not accountable to the general public. So we don’t know what is going on. Freelancers, independent filmmakers, journalists have to go after getting the information out, in whatever way works. Factual information, that’s in the public interest to know. I think people ought to do whatever it takes, whether it means skirting the ethical borderline about representing your topic or taking other kinds of risks. If you don’t do that, you’re never going to get any kind of information out.”

Michael Fox is a San Francisco-based freelance journalist and film critic.

Read filmmaker Q&As and find out more about the films featured in this Inside Indies In Focus exclusive:

MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY
LA SIERRA
CHINA BLUE
DEMOCRACY ON DEADLINE: The Global Struggle for an Independent Press

(An Inside Indies exclusive posted June 27, 2007.)