Canadian filmmaker of Chinese origin Yung Chang shot a documentary adventure about the controversial British journalist and war reporter Robert Fisk. Unfortunately, just a few months after the premiere of “This is Not a Movie”, Fisk died in Dublin, and until the very end, in his seventies, he worked tirelessly as a Middle East correspondent for the Independent. And it’s not a classic biographical documentary, but apparently Chang occasionally spent several years in Fisk’s company and accompanied him during his reporting adventures.
That’s how we meet Fisk in 2018, trying to break into Homs after that city in Syria was liberated from Isil. We walk with Fisk through a city completely razed to the ground, and already then he introduces us to his main rule when it comes to journalism: trust only your eyes and ears. Fisk’s second rule is to question authorities and the official narrative, and because of his reporting from the beginning of the seventies in Northern Ireland and across the Middle East in the following four decades, he gained numerous enemies and critics. And this will definitely be an interesting documentary for everyone who is interested in journalism, especially war reporting, because hardly any journalist has more game in his legs than Fisk.
He points out that the last war in Syria was actually the first war in which he could not go to the other side and hear a different opinion because he would very likely end up in an orange overall like, unfortunately, many of his colleagues. Although he is British, his reporting from Northern Ireland during the civil war there did not inspire enthusiasm in his country, and when Rupert Murdoch took over the Times, for which Fisk had written since his youth, and began to censor it, he switched to the Independent. When he ended up in Lebanon at the end of the seventies, he was immediately declared an anti-Semite, and later an apologist for Syrian President Assad.
However, Fisk himself says that he does not care much about what those who have never been on the spot say and think about him, and bonito from a safe distance. He claims that he has always been on the side of those who suffer and those who suffer, and the fact is, unfortunately, that today there are fewer and fewer original journalists like Fisk. A man of incredible knowledge and erudition, interested, active, who does not hesitate to express his opinion and view of a certain situation, regardless of the fact that it often does not fit into the official narrative and what the power centers would like to hear.