Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. PAUL BAINS 6 MIN Read 26 Sept 2025, 03:33 PM IST SEYMOUR HERSH IN ‘COVER-UP’ SUMMARY TWO documentary films on the Toronto International Film Festival Four the life and work of journalists Lynsey Addario and Seymour Hersh in a time when journalists are increasingly a task, two decorated, or a foreign film, two documented. Festival, which concluded on September 14, emphasizes why their work is so essential. After 20 years from behind the camera, American war photographer Lynsey Addario turns the lens in Love+War, of Oscar-winning filmmaking Duo Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. As a war photographer who covers conflicts and humanitarian crises around the world – including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Ukraine – addario is incompatible in her quest to document the human cost of war, often in her own danger. The documentary Chronicles Addario’s career over the past two decades, which has ended by recent assignments in Ukraine. In the early days of the war in 2022, she took a photo of a local family killed by mortar strike right in front of her eyes. The image ended up on the cover of the New York Times and refuted from Putin’s allegations that the Russian army did not target civilians. The Pulitzer-winning journalist also documented life in Afghanistan, both before and after-9/11, the Libyan civil war covered during the Arab Spring and light on Sierra Leone’s high maternal death rates. In the course of the duty, Addario (51) was kidnapped twice – once in Iraq and again in Libya – but continues to return to the front lines in the service of something greater than herself. When she is trapped in the crossfire of different conflicts, she has inevitably questioned why she continues to do this work. Over time, she realized that her ability to access certain spaces where her male colleagues are not allowed gives her the unique opportunity to tell stories about the women and children suffering as collateral damage in war, and it is this sense of purpose that drives her. Addario’s career is impressive and inspiring (and often nail biting), but the real strength of love+war is when it is past the professional in the personal push. The filmmakers – and addario herself – do not give a glamor about her work regularly taking her away from her family, including two young children, and that the possibility of death is always great. As a mother, she is regularly asked when she intends to retire from this life -threatening work for the sake of her children. But addario is clear about the risks she takes, and comforted in the fact that her children will still have a loving father (Paul de Berg, a former Reuters journalist), must happen to her. Addario is perhaps a mother, but she does not treat it like the most important work in the world, and it is refreshing to see that a working mother does not provide the usual resistance to the challenges of a balance between work and life, or that he has guilt not to have everything. Applied in a candid – and probably unpopular – she says, ‘In my heart, all I want to do to shoot,’ and adds that she feels ‘most present’ when she is on the command. The film does not shake away from the impact of Addario’s choices on her husband, children, parents and sisters. But it also shows that her decision to keep working in conflict zones has not been taken lightly. The honesty and transparency that Addario presents in the film is commendable, not least because women (especially mothers) are rarely allowed to prioritize themselves or their careers without criticism of friends, strangers and the world in general. Another journalist whose life and career was inspiring to many people is the legendary investigator Seymour Hersh, subject of Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’s urgent documentary coverage. Hersh is the reason why the world knows during the Vietnam War, the torture of civilians in my Lai and other towns, the torture of Iraqi prisoners by American troops in Abu Ghraib, and the attempt to cover the water holes burglary. The investigative journalist, now 88 years old, is considered (and feared) as a formidable figure in American media for his penchant to dig up stories that want to hide mighty people. Hersh is an investigative reporter for the old school-he asks many questions, follows, cultivates, cultivates sources and reads between the lines to sniff out what is not said. In his early days that the Pentagon covered in the 1960s, he was known to err in the halls to pick up information rather than reportingly reported in the official press briefing. He even spent his phone number on a radio show once, and that’s how he got an anonymous call that made him tilt over the torture at Abu Ghraib. Finding the stories and telling what is not told – or rather, is actively suppressed – Hersh’s specialty is, and in the documentary he regrets the fact that not enough journalists do the same. Poitras, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind CitizenFour and all the beauty and bloodshed, have been following Hersh for 20 years. He eventually granted the subject of this film, probably convinced of the involvement of Obenhaus, with whom he previously worked on three investigative documentary films. But he is still not quite sure if he wants to be there at all and makes no qualifications about hiding his reservations, especially if the topic of confidential sources emerges. “It’s hard to know who to trust. I hardly trust you, ‘he said to them at some point. The film offers us Hersh in all its glory – its irritability, his combat ability, his mind, his zeal, his intelligence. His stubborn, no-nonsense earth and a strong moral center shine through, and it’s easy to see how this man has built a career from speaking the truth. Like many independent journalists around the world, Hersh recently found a home on substack, where the logline is appropriate for his newsletter: “It’s worse than you think.” Through the lens of Hersh’s work, the filmmakers can paint a damning picture of decades of the US government and military misconduct and moral corruption, which draws a doorway of the Vietnam war to the atrocities committed in Palestine today. Hersh, alternating throughout the film, speaks to an anonymous source in Gaza, who calls him with proof that the Israeli army is systematically targeting and killing civilians. These interwoven crimes of the American Empire in the past and the current crimes make an essential viewing for our time. What demonstrates both Addario and Hersh in these few documentary films is their empathy. Their task may be to document and transfer the worst crimes and atrocities to the world, but that does not mean that they do not despair the suffering of others, or that they are not done by oppression and injustice. Both tear at different points as they talk about the stories they forced to cover. Journalists may be neutral, but that doesn’t mean they are not human. PAUL Bains is a freelance film critic and cultural writer in Toronto. Catch all the business news, market news, news reports and latest news updates on Live Mint. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates. More Topics #Features Read Next Story
‘Love+War’ and ‘Cover-up’ shows us the human side of top journalists
