Coming to DVD next Tuesday, February 21: SHOOTING ROBERT KING
Richard Parry’s portrait of a war photographer made its world premiere (under the original title BLOOD TRAIL) at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival, and came stateside the next year with screenings at SXSW, Silverdocs, and True/False, among others.
Using the tagline “15 Years, 3 Wars, 1 Photographer,” the doc tells the story of the titular war correspondent, beginning as a naive 24-year-old covering the war in Bosnia in 1993, following up when he is a hardened man in Chechnya in 1997, and finding him more at peace in 2007, both embedded within the US military in Iraq and at home in the Tennessee woods on a deer-hunting trip. Robert King is the focus through which the film explores the complex and at times contradictory forces motivating journalists to put themselves in harm’s way to bear witness to war and atrocity. At the same time, the longitudinal aspect of the story, with Parry filming King whenever he could over more than a decade, allows the audience to see the fascinating transformation of its subject over time – speaking to the powerful impact war has on even those documenting it.
what (not) to doc 