War reporter, the movie

I recently visited Canada, where I had the opportunity to watch several interesting and moving films from different countries... and of eating small, costly and exquisitely "contrapuntal" salads at the nicest terraces of the Quartier Latin.

Among those that catched my attention was the Argentinian/Venezuelan "Como Dios nos trajo", by Maury Marcano, a candid filmmaker who despite the big curiosity she felt for the inner life of the striptease clubs and the ladies who work there, only allowed herself to taste the surface of the mud of sexual exploitation and erotic sadness, but being enough honest to say so.

Other was the Japanese "Carpe Nostalgia", that won the second prize after re-screening in a packed theater at first hour in the morning, before an audience who cried and laughed at the depiction of hard realities and profound emotions set to happen around a little coffee shop in a small fishermen town "looking across the sea to distant Mt Fuji".

But I will undoubtably remember "Il Hay Yrawa", a documentary where the people who covered recent developments in the Arab World for international TV networks tell and show their own humanity, trying to cover themselves from very real crossfire (and cross-discourse), fearing more the possibility of loosing the take than a leg, always being in a hurry and always having the steadiest of the hands, because someone has to hold the camera to tell the World how things happen... from the closest distance possible.

Having had that fantasy of being a war reporter since I was in high school, and having being a stringer for international TV myself for many years (as the director), but also having felt -more often than one would like to admit-  that uncomfortable realization that in some way one is only a piece in the news machinery, I found the work by Mohamed Amine very moving.

These real-life-shoots moving while runing in the middle of a demonstration or jumping among wrecage, that non-sleep hearing these cries in the back that one only hears in the editing room but not while in the field, that unavoidable need to spend the life, literally, doing "this"... for love!

This was not a great cinematic work, but how moving was to see these hard men who would certainly die on call, camera in their hands -as the two whose stories were told in the movie- crying in sorrow for those who needed the hospital bed better than themselves!