Journalism can be a dangerous profession, and the risks are amplified by the stability of the place news is being covered. Many hostile regions freely target members of the press, who typically travel in vehicles and clothing marked with their designations to hopefully shield them from harm. Covering war is never easy, but some still seek it out, determined to spread important messages to the world that otherwise would have no way of being broadly transmitted. Margaret Moth was one such driven and fearless journalist whose story is chronicled in Never Look Away.
The New Zealand-born Moth worked for years as a camerawoman for CNN, traveling to multiple war zones in Europe and the Middle East. Seen at one point on the roof of a building expected to be the target of a retaliatory bomb strike any minute so she could get the best shot, Moth exuded confidence and a desire above all to capture everything she saw. But she also paid dearly for her intrepid and important journalistic instincts, suffering a brutal sniper gunshot to the jaw that required excessive reconstruction and changed her life from that point forward. Yet she wasn’t deterred from continuing in the same hard-hitting field after that, even if her editors were wary of putting her in harm’s way.
Moth, who died from cancer in 2010, hangs over this film like a specter. There are multiple images of her in the prime of her career but little in the way of recordings which feature the sound of her voice. Her reputation is built by interviews with those who either worked or slept with her, and only after her injury does she appear on-camera and speaking. Her face is so transformed that this surely can’t be the energy of the fearless camerawoman conveyed by those who knew her best, but that’s all this film can do since that footage simply doesn’t exist. It’s also worth noting that Moth did continue to work after the injury with the same sense of driven recklessness, not able to communicate in the same way but just as determined to get every shot.
This marks the directorial debut of actress Lucy Lawless, best known for her roles in Xena: Warrior Princess and Battlestar Galactica. While there is indeed some action to be found in this film and the images captured on camera, it’s a much more deliberately-paced look at one person’s life. Lawless does get to know Moth as best as she can, and it’s a portrait that feels very much alive despite the obvious lack of present-day access to its subject. This surely isn’t the movie that lifelong Lawless fans would expect her to make, but it is a story of a prominent and celebrated woman from New Zealand made by another much more famous Kiwi.
When this documentary doesn’t have the archive footage it needs to convey important pieces of Moth’s life and career, it gets creative. Miniature recreations of a deserted and treacherous street serve to illustrate one of the tense scenes described, paired with voiceover narration from former CNN colleagues about what was happening. It’s an effective tool, one of many to capture someone rarely seen in front of the camera but entirely committed to filming everything she could, often in the most precarious of circumstances. Her life was cut tragically short at the age of fifty-nine after already enduring a life-altering injury, but this film shows that Moth remained incomparably driven throughout it all.
Grade: B+
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Never Look Away makes its world premiere in the World Cinema Documentary Competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.