The China Mail - Venice festival turns gaze on war reporters, media industry

Palestinian director Ahmed Hassouna's film is one of several at the Venice Film Festival this year about journalism, whether the high stakes faced by war correspondents, or the morally ambiguous methods used by certain media to gain viewers.

"Citizen Osama", chosen as the Palestinian entry to compete for best foreign film in the 2027 Academy Awards, lays bare the life of a Palestinian journalist "who suffers just like anyone else" in Gaza, said its director Hassouna.

"A journalist is not a soulless camera; he is a man struggling to find water, fighting to obtain food and constantly worrying about how to find milk for his newborn baby or how to feed his wife so she can breastfeed their child," Hassouna wrote in the film's liner notes.

The documentary powerfully captures the apocalyptic landscape of Gaza City, its streets reduced to rubble and mangled rebar, and the weighty sense of responsibility shouldered by the few remaining journalists on the ground.

"I wanted to show that the journalist who captures suffering for the world is himself living through that same tragedy behind the lens," wrote Hassouna, who remains in Gaza.

UN experts, rights groups and activists have accused Israel of deliberately targeting Palestinian journalists, with the Committee to Protect Journalists counting more than 200 killed in Gaza since October 2023.

"Citizen Obama" covers the killing of Al-Jazeera journalist Ismail al-Ghoul in an Israeli airstrike in July 2024, an incident that was internationally condemned.

In 2025, days after a film about Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna was selected to play at the Cannes Film Festival, she was killed in an airstrike.

Foreign reporters are still blocked from entering Gaza by Israeli authorities -- unless they are in tightly controlled tours organised by the military.

- Freedom of the press -

In a politically charged season at the Venice festival, conflicts feature prominently -- with films featuring variously the Vietnam War, Chile before Pinochet's military coup, Gaza and the West Bank.

Eagerly awaited next week is the premiere of "NAZA", a documentary from Oscar winners Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor about the Israeli military's killing of civilians in Gaza.

Another Venice film with the protagonist a war correspondent is "La Ragazza con la Leica" (Girl with the Leica), which reimagines real-life Spanish Civil War photographer Gerda Taro.

Long overlooked, Taro was the photographer partner and companion of legendary lensman Robert Capa and the first woman photojournalist to die on the battlefield.

The film's director, Alina Marazzi, said their work was part of the "golden age of photojournalism."

"If we think that at the time, probably the majority of the population was illiterate and couldn't read what was written in the newspapers, through photographs you could show what was happening in places of conflict, the effects of war on the civilian population, for example in the Spanish Civil War," she told a press conference earlier this week.

Today, in the age of artificial intelligence and with millions of people wielding cameras on their phones, the accuracy and transparency of published images are not necessarily guaranteed, Marazzi said.

"We must defend freedom of the press," she said.

The ongoing battle to protect independent journalism plays out in Russian-American director Julia Loktev's "My Undesirable Friends: Part II – Exile", the gripping continuation of her documentary that sees the journalists forced to flee Moscow after Russia's invasion of Ukraine now struggling to rebuild their lives.

And in the Fleet Street juggernaut "Ink", director Danny Boyle covers the meteoric rise of Rupert Murdoch's tabloid The Sun through an irresistible cocktail of sensationalism and sex, forever changing the face of British journalism.

A morally questionable reporter-turned TV host is the protagonist of Lance Oppenheim's "Primetime", based on the real-life NBC television show "To Catch a Predator" that unmasked paedophiles after luring them to staged meetings with minors.

L.Johnson--ThChM