This Is Not a Movie (15)
Directed by Yung Chang
★★★★

WHAT makes a great journalist? And, in the wake of President Trump's fake news agenda, what exactly is the function of journalism today?

Those are the questions addressed in this captivating and insightful profile of award-winning foreign and Middle East correspondent and author Robert Fisk.

Armed with just a notebook and pen or pencil, he has been reporting on some of the most violent and divisive conflicts around the world for more than 40 years, first for The Times and then for The Independent

Fisk sees himself as a rare breed of being both a street reporter in the front line of wars and a columnist. “What I write about is what I have just seen having come from the front line,” he says.

“If you don't go to the scene and sniff, and talk to the people and see it with your own eyes you cannot get near what the truth is.”

He doesn't believe in reporting what someone has said or seen on YouTube and is a firm believer that as a journalist you have “ to challenge authority on a story.”

When asked by Osama Bin Laden, who he interviewed three times between 1993 and ‘97, if he was a Muslim he said no. “I am a journalist and my job is to tell the truth,” he told him.

Acclaimed filmmaker Yung Chang interviews and follows Fisk in action at work on the ground and at the front line in northern Syria in 2018 and, through archive news footage of Fisk's previous reports on massacres and conflicts in the Middle East and when he first started as a reporter in Northern Ireland, the documentary gives an insight into how dangerous the job of a journalist can be.

The film also looks at the ever-changing face of news, from print to online journalism. Fisk is very much “old school” and prefers newspapers to online news.

He shows off his extensive reference archive of newspaper clippings and it's ironic that he has been writing for a paper that has largely gone digital.

He's filing copy to editors who are too young to remember many of the gruesome events that he has covered in the past, such as the Sabra and Shatila massacres of Paletstinian refugees in Beirut in 1982, carried out by a right-wing Christian militia facilitated by occupying Israeli forces.

Containing some disturbing footage, this is a fascinating and thought-provoking film which provides a unique insight into past conflicts and wars in the Middle East and the experience of a foreign correspondent reporting on them.

Available on Curzon Home Cinema from June 12.