Chris Knipp
10-24-2025, 02:04 PM
http://www.chrisknipp.com/images/%20ladd2.jpg
LYNSEY ADDARIO IN LOVE + WAR
JIMMY CHIN, ELIZABETH CHAI VASARHELYI: LOVE+WAR (2025)
TRAILER (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSqRXVlITBc)
PORTFOLIO OF ADDARIO'S PHOTOGRAPHY (https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1182957116546539&set=a.264310495077877)
Can a mom be a war photographer?*
Lynsey Addario is a war photographer. Paul de Bendern is her husband, a former Reuters correspondent who runs a news agency in London. They have two young sons. The sons were born after she went to cover the Arab Spring in Libya and got kidnapped with three male American journalists. This troubling incident may be too briefly dealt with, and shows how the material here is sometimes hard for a film like this to cover adequately. Lynsey comes from a loving family, with a mother and a gay dad who were hairdressers in Connecticut, and three sisters, who love her.
This National Geographic-produced film does a neat trick in covering the conflict between being a normal human being and doing one of the riskiest jobs on the planet - on the one hand - and - on the other hand - many of the extraordinary stories, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Sudan, Libya, most of the hottest hot spots of the last two decades, that we see Lynsey covering right in the thick of it. Whoever filmed her on these missions also risked their lives, as she did, photojournalists she collaborates with such as Ukrainian Andriy Dubcha and Thorsten Thielow.
Kudos are due also to the team of Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, who won the Best Documentary Oscar six years ago for Free Solo, about climber Alex Honnold. This is not as rare and unusual or shot-for-the film material as Alex Honnold was, but the duo's coverage of the war photographer life here is superb.
The film leaves us impressed - after all, her work makes a difference, in several cases dramatically. One of her photos of Ukrainian civilians killed by Russia, on the front page of the New York Times, (which she works for independently, with The National Geographic and Time) went viral and became a key image of the conflict. Other coverage of women dying in childbirth led to a $500 million grant from pharmaceutical executives that helped reverse this situation. She has received a Pulitzer and a MacArthur genius grant. The still and film coverage of Lynsey's work in combat locations is impressive. Leslie Felperin in her Hollywood Repor.ter (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/love-war-photographer-lynsey-addario-1236367241/) review calls it "a visually harrowing but often ravishing record. . ." The rich but concise coverage of the career owes much to the skillful editing of Keiko Deguchi and Hypatia Porter
But the film also leaves us troubled. A better title might be not "Love Plus War" but "Love Minus War" because those who love Lynsey, most of all her two young sons, are made to suffer by the work she does. The boys care enormously about their mother, are tremendously excited when she reappears for a spell, but she is basically an absentee mom. At one point one of her sons becomes sullen and distant, and the other regresses and begins wetting the bed. Her job takes a direct toll on them. But she cannot curtail it. She is somewhat distant when at home in London, and asserts that it is at war working that she feels most at home and when with husband and sons she feels she should be doing her crucial work. That work takes its toll on her too: he has the look in her eyes sometimes of one who has seen much death and cannot shake it off.
Lynsey denies that she's an adrenaline junky or that that is what it's about, but admits that what gets you hooked is the size of what you're dealing with. Iraq, Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, Russian and Ukraine: she has plunged into the perilous nerve center of the biggest news stories of the day. She suggests that this is a calling, even a duty: people urgently need to know what her images tell them. What I got out of this film that was new is the idea that those who make war don't want us to see what is going on.
What nis also deeply troubling and most evident with Israel's genocide in Gaza is that people can sometimes indifferently watch horror perpetrated a people day after day for two years and basically do nothing. Lynsey, who is heard from frequently in this film, admits sometimes she wonders if what she is doing is worth it, or means anything. It is worth it and she does it extremely well. The film also names a roll call of other great and too little remembered female war correspondents, and partly of course Lynsey's sex is the reason for making this film. An officer from Restrepo (about which there is a notable war documentary) describes Lynsey and a female colleague who covered them in their ultra-dangerous conflict zone as being "hard as woodpecker lips," thus trustworthy de facto additions to their unit, but the phrase, Felperin suggests, "apt but perhaps not entirely a compliment." The film (2010) is about the craziness and the danger of American soldiers' lives in Afghanistan, and was made by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington. When Hetherington died in Libya of shrapnel wounds it is a shock to Lynsey, who knew him from Afghanistan, and a warning of how dangerous Libya was. And then she was kidnapped there. Her work in Afghanistan illustrating the plight of women under the Taliban first hand is an illustration of how Lynsey's gender, which she sometimes supersedes, can sometimes also be a special asset.
War correspondents are a special breed. One of them, also now a [I]New Yorker editor, notes that Lynsey's "pictures" are proof or how good she is at it - "and that she's still alive." But this is a craft and art and calling that Lynsey's loved ones might prefer for her to leave. In showing this conflict and the family's role as it does this film provides a more three-dimensional portrait of this almost superhuman breed than usual, even if the material at times feels a little rushed-over to fit the compact runtime.
Love+War, 95 mins., premiered at TIIF Sept. 7, 2025. It showed at over a dozon other mostly local US fests, but including Mill Valley, BFI London, and AFI. Opens in theaters starting Oct. 24, 2025, West Coast Oct. 31.
__________
*My title comes from a review (https://www.bookclubbabble.com/can-a-mom-be-a-war-photographer/) of a memoir by Addario published in 2015, not mentioned here, entitled What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War.
LYNSEY ADDARIO IN LOVE + WAR
JIMMY CHIN, ELIZABETH CHAI VASARHELYI: LOVE+WAR (2025)
TRAILER (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSqRXVlITBc)
PORTFOLIO OF ADDARIO'S PHOTOGRAPHY (https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1182957116546539&set=a.264310495077877)
Can a mom be a war photographer?*
Lynsey Addario is a war photographer. Paul de Bendern is her husband, a former Reuters correspondent who runs a news agency in London. They have two young sons. The sons were born after she went to cover the Arab Spring in Libya and got kidnapped with three male American journalists. This troubling incident may be too briefly dealt with, and shows how the material here is sometimes hard for a film like this to cover adequately. Lynsey comes from a loving family, with a mother and a gay dad who were hairdressers in Connecticut, and three sisters, who love her.
This National Geographic-produced film does a neat trick in covering the conflict between being a normal human being and doing one of the riskiest jobs on the planet - on the one hand - and - on the other hand - many of the extraordinary stories, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Sudan, Libya, most of the hottest hot spots of the last two decades, that we see Lynsey covering right in the thick of it. Whoever filmed her on these missions also risked their lives, as she did, photojournalists she collaborates with such as Ukrainian Andriy Dubcha and Thorsten Thielow.
Kudos are due also to the team of Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, who won the Best Documentary Oscar six years ago for Free Solo, about climber Alex Honnold. This is not as rare and unusual or shot-for-the film material as Alex Honnold was, but the duo's coverage of the war photographer life here is superb.
The film leaves us impressed - after all, her work makes a difference, in several cases dramatically. One of her photos of Ukrainian civilians killed by Russia, on the front page of the New York Times, (which she works for independently, with The National Geographic and Time) went viral and became a key image of the conflict. Other coverage of women dying in childbirth led to a $500 million grant from pharmaceutical executives that helped reverse this situation. She has received a Pulitzer and a MacArthur genius grant. The still and film coverage of Lynsey's work in combat locations is impressive. Leslie Felperin in her Hollywood Repor.ter (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/love-war-photographer-lynsey-addario-1236367241/) review calls it "a visually harrowing but often ravishing record. . ." The rich but concise coverage of the career owes much to the skillful editing of Keiko Deguchi and Hypatia Porter
But the film also leaves us troubled. A better title might be not "Love Plus War" but "Love Minus War" because those who love Lynsey, most of all her two young sons, are made to suffer by the work she does. The boys care enormously about their mother, are tremendously excited when she reappears for a spell, but she is basically an absentee mom. At one point one of her sons becomes sullen and distant, and the other regresses and begins wetting the bed. Her job takes a direct toll on them. But she cannot curtail it. She is somewhat distant when at home in London, and asserts that it is at war working that she feels most at home and when with husband and sons she feels she should be doing her crucial work. That work takes its toll on her too: he has the look in her eyes sometimes of one who has seen much death and cannot shake it off.
Lynsey denies that she's an adrenaline junky or that that is what it's about, but admits that what gets you hooked is the size of what you're dealing with. Iraq, Afghanistan, the Arab Spring, Russian and Ukraine: she has plunged into the perilous nerve center of the biggest news stories of the day. She suggests that this is a calling, even a duty: people urgently need to know what her images tell them. What I got out of this film that was new is the idea that those who make war don't want us to see what is going on.
What nis also deeply troubling and most evident with Israel's genocide in Gaza is that people can sometimes indifferently watch horror perpetrated a people day after day for two years and basically do nothing. Lynsey, who is heard from frequently in this film, admits sometimes she wonders if what she is doing is worth it, or means anything. It is worth it and she does it extremely well. The film also names a roll call of other great and too little remembered female war correspondents, and partly of course Lynsey's sex is the reason for making this film. An officer from Restrepo (about which there is a notable war documentary) describes Lynsey and a female colleague who covered them in their ultra-dangerous conflict zone as being "hard as woodpecker lips," thus trustworthy de facto additions to their unit, but the phrase, Felperin suggests, "apt but perhaps not entirely a compliment." The film (2010) is about the craziness and the danger of American soldiers' lives in Afghanistan, and was made by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington. When Hetherington died in Libya of shrapnel wounds it is a shock to Lynsey, who knew him from Afghanistan, and a warning of how dangerous Libya was. And then she was kidnapped there. Her work in Afghanistan illustrating the plight of women under the Taliban first hand is an illustration of how Lynsey's gender, which she sometimes supersedes, can sometimes also be a special asset.
War correspondents are a special breed. One of them, also now a [I]New Yorker editor, notes that Lynsey's "pictures" are proof or how good she is at it - "and that she's still alive." But this is a craft and art and calling that Lynsey's loved ones might prefer for her to leave. In showing this conflict and the family's role as it does this film provides a more three-dimensional portrait of this almost superhuman breed than usual, even if the material at times feels a little rushed-over to fit the compact runtime.
Love+War, 95 mins., premiered at TIIF Sept. 7, 2025. It showed at over a dozon other mostly local US fests, but including Mill Valley, BFI London, and AFI. Opens in theaters starting Oct. 24, 2025, West Coast Oct. 31.
__________
*My title comes from a review (https://www.bookclubbabble.com/can-a-mom-be-a-war-photographer/) of a memoir by Addario published in 2015, not mentioned here, entitled What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War.