‘Restrepo’ Co-Director Tim Hetherington Killed in Libya
Tim Hetherington, one of the two directors of the Oscar-nominated documentary "Restrepo," has been killed in Libya, according to ABC News. The 40-year-old photographer was in the country, according to Vanity Fair, on "a personal project."
According to ABC News, Hetherington's death came during a mortar attack
in the Libyan city of Misrata, where fighting had been intense for days
between Libyan rebels and Muammar Qaddafi's soldiers. (Other journalists
and photographers were also injured during the fighting.) Hetherington's final tweet, which appeared yesterday, suggested the unrest going on around him: "In besieged Libyan city of Misrata. Indiscriminate shelling by Qaddafi forces. No sign of NATO."
Born in Liverpool, Hetherington worked as a photojournalist for many years, covering the most unstable areas of the planet like West Africa and Afghanistan. With his fellow journalist Sebastian Junger, he made the documentary "Restrepo," which chronicled the lives of American soldiers in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, considered one of the most dangerous regions of the country. Premiering at Sundance in 2010, the film won the festival's Grand Jury Prize for documentaries, receiving praise for its intimate portrait of soldiers at war, including scenes shot in the thick of firefights.
That incredible footage was thanks to the two filmmakers spending months embedded with the U.S. platoon. "It's an emotional journey you go on," Hetherington told IFC last summer around the film's release. (It was also a physically demanding ordeal: Hetherington broke his leg during filming.) He and Junger took pains to say that they weren't trying to make a commentary about war but, rather, simply document what it feels like from a soldier's perspective. "In some ways, you can't intellectualize war," Hetherington said, "so we try to bring you emotionally close to it. And I think that experience makes you wake up and see these guys as individuals, not as ciphers or symbols as they're often represented in the press."
Before being one of the directors and cinematographers on "Restrepo," he had served as the cinematographer on "The Devil Came on Horseback," a documentary that examined the genocide going on in Darfur, another area Hetherington had photographed as part of his job.
Hetherington had made his career risking his life photographing war-torn areas. And when he talked about "Restrepo" and its apolitical nature, he argued that his job as a journalist wasn't to convey some sort of message. As he told The A.V. Club, it went deeper than that:
"The funny thing about war is that people feel you need to be morally outraged. I feel morally outraged about it, and I've been doing it for long enough to feel morally outraged, because I have been in massacre scenes in West Africa, and I've been doing this for a long time now. So I don't need to have my credentials and go up on the stage and say 'Feel moral outrage about the war.' I'm trying to communicate to you what's going on in the war, and moral outrage really just gets in the way. If you say to an audience, 'Who here feels there shouldn't be war?' I can guarantee everyone would put their hand up, but that doesn't mean you're any wiser about why the war's happening, or what it's like to be in the war. There are more important things we have to communicate, rather than have the consensus of 'Oh, we're journalists, and we think this is bad.'"
War Photographer Tim Hetherington Killed in Libya Attack [ABC News]
