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Joshua Reviews Sebastian Junger’s Which Way Is The Front Line From Here [Theatrical Review]

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Nearly two years ago, on April 20, 2011, the world lost one of its foremost journalistic voices. Tim Hetherington, best known as one of today’s greatest photo-journalists and documentarians lost his life while covering a story in the city of Misrata in Libya. Attempting to cover the Libyan Civil War, the photographer/filmmaker was taken from this world due to a mortar shell, an explosive that also took the life of fellow photographer Chris Hondros, while wounding photographer Guy Martin.

However, while Hetherington put his life in dangerous situations from day one, it wasn’t without reason, and it wasn’t without breathtaking and affecting results. And his death proved that while his work often brought with it great danger, it truly changed lives, and the world.

One life that it forever changed was that of director Sebastian Junger. The pair teamed up for the masterful documentary Restrepo, which tells the story of a group of soldiers embedded in the Korengal Valley, one of the most dangerous segments of Afghanistan. Early on in their deployment, the platoon loses one of their members, Sebastian Restrepo (for who the observation post the film focuses on is named), and what follows is a harrowing tale of men at war and under attack, and also (as this new film discusses) the true meaning of war.

And now, in honor of his fallen friend, Junger is back with a new film, and it’s as moving and startlingly complex as its main focal point.

Entitled Which Way Is The Front Line From Here? The Life And Time Of Tim Hetherington, the film looks at, you guessed it, the life and work of the late Tim Hetherington, and it proves to be a truly affecting portrait of a truly lively soul.

Featuring interviews with just about every life Hetherington touched, the film’s greatest attribute is its ability to not only tell the story of his life in the form of a timeline of events, but even more so the creative energy with which he lived his life. As the picture posits, Heatherington not only lived his life to cover stories that no other news outlet would dare take a look at, but he tried to dig even deeper than just a topical discussion. At the man’s core was the drive to get to the real meaning of war, and in the end, the film’s greatest attribute is that it is a portrait of an artist as his own body of discovery. Through these testimonials, particularly Junger’s, one discovers that in Hetherington’s death, we discover that the meaning of war isn’t the battles or the propaganda, but instead the idea that you know for certain that you will lose your brothers and sisters. Death is a certainty, and it’s seen within all of Hetherington’s work, particularly something like Restrepo, where these men are not only dealing with war, but with the loss of a brother.

Cinematically, this film is truly superb. While focused around interviews and archival footage, the film is as vital as any biographical documentary around, and it’s thanks to Junger’s love and affection for his late comrade. One feels the admiration for Hetherington throughout the film, but it is more than just a surface level glance at a man’s body of work. This is a love letter to a lost brother from a man deeply affected by his time spent with a kindred spirit. Junger hits at many different aspects of Hetherington’s life, be it his willingness to get into dangerous situations, or the fact that at one point in time, he was actually willing to settle down with girlfriend Idil Ibrahim, only to be sucked back in by the Libyan crisis. It’s truly a touching ode to Hetherington, a journalist willing to do anything and everything to bring a voice to those who are truly voiceless.

Touching on everything Hetherington had his hands on ranging from his work for print outlets to his short film Diary, Front Line is a heartbreaking look at a voice taken away from us far too soon.  Seemingly from the heart of a man who is trying to find a way to recover from the loss of a kindred spirit, director Sebastian Junger crafts a visually muted but emotionally devastating biography surrounding the life of Tim Hetherington. Ending on a coda that may be the best final few moments of any film see so far in 2013, Which Way Is The Front Line From Here is an absolutely stunner.

The film airs on HBO starting on April 18.

Joshua Brunsting

Josh is a critic, a member of the Online Film Critics Society, a wrestling nerd, a hip-hop head, a father, a cinephile and a man looking to make his stamp on the world, one word at a time.