Bearing Witness

Barbara Kopple, an eminent documentarian, here shares the director’s credit with two others, but the film bears her mark. Harlan County, USA (1976) and American Dream (1991) are two epics of union organizing, among coal miners and meatpackers, and both are among my all-time favorites. I believe both won Oscars for best doc. She took an unfortunate turn toward celebrity profile with Wild Man Blues (1997), decently made but Woody Allen definitely does not need more exposure. Here she sort of splits the difference, latches on to characters with cachet but brings the news about an important story. The filmmakers follow five rather glamorous women journalists and photographers into Iraq in the wake of the U.S. invasion. Their individual stories unfold as the occupation does: one photographer is imprisoned in Abu Ghraib but winds up documenting the insurgency with her filmmaking boyfriend; another has put romance on hold and at 47 still lugs her video camera into hot spots around the world for CNN; there are two self-dramatizing but still admirable foreign correspondents, one who lost her eye to Sri Lankan government forces but regains her first hubby after the second has killed himself, and another who opts out of the danger rush to marry and have a baby before it’s too late; and most impressive of all, a young Asian-American woman working with Al-Jazeera in a brave if overmatched effort to foster mutual understanding in a world of conflict. The film works on a number of levels, interweaving intimate views of the breaking chaos in Iraq, explorations in the psychology of danger-seeking, and feminist decision-making on the balance of life and work. It’s not entirely self-admiring, but does credit the importance of Bearing Witness. (The only way to see this film outside the festival circuit is on the cable channel A&E, which gave me yet another reason to bless my TiVo, for allowing me to skip right over the inane commercial interruptions.) (2005, A&E/T, n.) *7+*