Photojournalist Tim Hetherington, centre, died in 2011
When
Sebastian Junger began to piece together the last hours of a
photographer killed in Libya, it led him to make a film about his
friend's life, a work which receives its world premiere on Sunday.
Tim Hetherington's most acclaimed assignment took him from a remote US Army outpost in Afghanistan to the Oscars.In April 2011, the British-born photojournalist attended the Academy Awards with Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm. Restrepo, their film chronicling the lives of a platoon of soldiers stationed in the Korengal Valley near the border with Pakistan, had been nominated in the Best Documentary category.
Less than two months later, Hetherington was dead.
He bled to death on his way to hospital after being hit by shrapnel from a mortar blast in the Libyan city of Misrata. The explosion also killed fellow photographer Chris Hondros and injured two others.
In an attempt to find out more about Hetherington's last hours, Junger began talking to friends and relatives.
"I had a lot of questions about how he died. I organised studio interviews with anyone who could shed any light on what happened," he told me from his home in New York.
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Tim Hetherington, 1970-2011
- Born in Liverpool, held dual UK/US citizenship
- Awarded 2007 World Press Photo of the Year for coverage of US soldiers in Afghanistan
- Killed in a mortar attack in Misrata in April 2011
- He had been capturing images of fighting between Colonel Gaddafi's forces and Libyan rebels (with whom he is pictured above)
"I thought if I'm going to talk
to them then I should record them. If I'm going to record them I should
videotape them - and if I'm going to videotape them, then I should make a
movie."
The result is an HBO documentary, Which Way is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Times of Tim Hetherington, which receives its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah on Sunday. The film traces Hetherington's career from promising student at Cardiff University to award-winning photographer.
A biography by the writer and journalist Alan Huffman will follow in March.
"He was 40 when he died and was clearly heading for extraordinary places as a photographer, as an artist, and as a human being," Junger says. "I was really eager to see where this guy was going because I knew it would be interesting."
The demands of a month-long book tour meant Junger had little opportunity to grieve in the weeks following his friend's death. By the end he was, by his own admission, "more or less a mess".
The work of Tim Hetherington Continue reading the main story
This picture of an exhausted US soldier resting in Restrepo bunker in Afghanistan won the World Press Photo Award in 2007
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