Never Look Away is a gripping documentary about New Zealand photojournalist Margaret Moth – our very own Lee Miller of war videography. It’s also the excellent directorial debut of actress and activist Lucy Lawless. Lawless draws together interviews with veteran war correspondents such as CNN’s chief anchor Christiane Amanpour and the BBC’s Susan Stein, and includes insights from Moth’s former paramours and family. Illustrated with archive footage shot by Moth, the result is an engrossing and poignant tale of adrenalin addiction and personal purpose.
Starting straight off with candid anecdotes about sex, drugs and photography, the story soon turns into a travelogue of the horrors of war, and those who are compulsively drawn to witnessing it first-hand.
The enigmatic Moth (born plain old Margaret Wilson, the free spirit changed her name to Gipsy Moth “because there were too many Wilsons”) grew up in Gisborne and studied at Canterbury University, before becoming Australasia’s first news camerawoman in the 1970s. By 1980, she quit TVNZ for the United States, where the spiky-fringed goth with striking blue eyes found she preferred chasing hurricanes to videoing city council meetings. Moth was soon embedded in conflict zones shooting for CNN, from Iraq to Rwanda, Bosnia to Zaire and the West Bank.
It’s a fascinating deep-dive into Moth’s professional and private behaviour, and in revealing her reckless, risk-taking raison d’être the film succeeds as both a biography and psychological profile. With the sharing of some pretty devastating stuff around intergenerational trauma and abuse, the film sheds light on why some people feel impelled to put their life on the line every day. Moth, who suffered serious facial injuries after being shot in Sarajevo in 1992, returned to work six months later. She died of cancer in 2010.
When well made (as this is), these types of documentaries are routinely enthralling. The heartrending Which Way Is the Front Line from Here? in 2013 was a searing portrait of British photographer Tim Hetherington, whose odysseys into conflict zones saw him Oscar-nominated for the film Restrepo. Even fictionalised dramas such as the 2016 Tina Fey-starring satire Whiskey Tango Foxtrot brilliantly conveyed the exhilaration of plunging oneself into the world’s worst situations (according to multiple talking heads here “war was the ultimate drug”).
A film about a fearless female who slept with her boots on, Never Look Away is a tribute to an astonishing, complicated woman, and a mesmerising story.
Rating out of five: ★★★★½
Never Look Away, directed by Lucy Lawless, is in cinemas now.
