“I have to constantly weigh what I will risk my life for. And it’s often civilians.”
The new documentary from Oscar-winning directors Elizabeth Chai Vasarhely and Jimmy Chin (“Free Solo”), “Love+War,” opens with gunshots and explosions heard in the distance. It’s Feb. 19, 2022, in Novoluhanske in Eastern Ukraine, mere days before Russia invades the country. Lynsey Addario, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, is on the ground reporting from the area firsthand.
Five days later, war would come to Ukraine. It still hasn’t left.
But the filmmakers, whose feature held its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, don’t take their cues from the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. Instead, their main subject is Addario herself, a veteran photojournalist who reported for The New York Times and published an image to prove Putin wrong about his claims that he was not targeting civilians. The photo gained worldwide attention — but to Addario, it’s just another day at the office.
Addario’s life exists within two different spaces. The first is the obvious one, the war zone that she covers for her job. The second is her home life, where her husband, Paul de Bendern, a former Reuters journalist, and her two children give her hope that the separation of work and life is a possibility. Paul and Lynsey made an agreement years ago to prioritize her work so that their children wouldn’t have two journalists as parents working 24-hour days.
Her family doesn’t stop Lynsey Addario from continuing to risk her life to document the pain, sense of injustice, and abuse that exists outside of her comfortable London home.
Lynsey has a distinct ability to go to places where men are not welcome. She shows the reality of war-torn places like Sierra Leone, Iraq and Ukraine in heart-wrenching detail, often depicting women and children in harsh situations. Her dedication to photojournalism is admirable, and the film focuses a lot on her professional accomplishments and documentation of humanitarian crises throughout the world.
But what “Love+War” does really well is its eventual pivot to a more intimate and emotionally complex narrative. It is jarring at first to understand that Lynsey is the focus of what seems like a war documentary on its surface. Yet, the tension between her professional ambitions and her family life is intriguing.
This is a woman who has been kidnapped and risked everything to tell a story through pictures. She is unapologetic about how that balance can be taken right up to an edge where boundaries are tested. Vasarhelyi and Chin are smart enough to expand those boundaries and let the audience in on the moments that encompass all of Lynsey’s life, including many sweet sequences of bathing her children at home and discussing her job with them and her husband.
The film’s title comes into focus more than halfway through its short 95-minute runtime, when it’s clear that Lynsey is a bit of an adrenaline junkie who keeps her eye on the prize. She is most present when she is working on the frontlines of a major global conflict, mostly because she understands her role in depicting history through a well-crafted lens. Vasarhelyi and Chin bring emotional weight through their storytelling of Lynsey’s wartime experiences and interviews with colleagues providing background for a person destined to be talked about in the same breath as famous photojournalists like Matthew Brady and Lee Miller.
It isn’t often that documentaries are made about women who choose their work over their family, but Lynsey Addario’s dedication to her job is anything but ordinary. “Love+War” ultimately feels like a confrontation with the cost of that dedication, rather than a celebration of one person’s achievements. The film contrasts harrowing war zone footage with quiet, fragile moments at home, creating a visceral portrait of a life split between two worlds.
It takes awhile to get to why Lynsey is so passionate about her work, but the film eventually becomes real, raw and deeply human. It’s more of an exploration of why women aren’t typically known for war photojournalism, but Lynsey Addario hopes to change that stereotype for future generations.
