War Videographer Margaret Moth Gets the Shot in ‘Never Look Away’

My cheery takeaway from Never Look Away, Lucy Lawless’s hectic documentary about fellow New Zealander and late CNN cameraperson Margaret Moth, is that it is a wonderful and rare thing when people get to do the work they are meant to.

Especially when that mission — in this case, racing to transmit war’s catastrophic impact on civilians to living rooms around the globe — is urgent and important. Moth embraced both the physical dangers and the existential dilemmas inherent in her job because of a profound need to give voice, saying, “The story has to be told.”

Never Look Away, which premiered one year ago at the Sundance Film Festival, screens Saturday, Feb. 8 at 12:15 p.m. as part of the Mostly British Film Festival at the Vogue Theater. Lawless will make an appearance via Zoom.

Moth had a complicated personality, like many war correspondents and photojournalists. We are introduced to her in Houston circa 1980 by the 17-year-old who dropped by her apartment to sell her weed. At first sight, Jeff Russi thought the exotic 30-year-old was “a gypsy fortune-teller.” In fact, he learned, Moth was a party-hearty skydiver for whom nothing was out of bounds.

They were lovers during Russi’s senior year and well beyond, even while Moth maintained relationships with other men at home and later on assignment. The lingering import of Russi’s poignant appearance in Never Look Away isn’t his recitation of hedonistic excess and full-tilt boogies but the lifelong imprint that the free- and full-spirited Moth left on him.

Lawless tosses the hard-edged rock of Heart’s Barracuda on the soundtrack, a fitting sonic companion to Moth’s spiky black hairdo and heavy eyeliner. But that’s as far as she is willing to push the aesthetics to mirror her subject’s rebelliousness and defiance. Except for a few recreations and animated sequences, Never Look Away conforms to the talking-heads-and-news-clips approach. While the doc is steeped fully in Moth’s passion for living on her own terms, I would have welcomed a more ragged and jagged style.

Very quickly, the picture of Moth as a fiercely strong-willed, completely autonomous woman comes into focus. Other lovers-slash-professional cohorts from the ’80s and ’90s, notably former CNN correspondent Stefano Kotsonis and French location-sound recordist Yaschinka (pop stars aren’t the only ones who go by one name, apparently), explain how Moth made a smooth transition from shooting staid corporate press conferences for CNN in Dallas to filming conflict zones in Bosnia, Rwanda, Iraq, Zaire and Lebanon.

“At a certain point,” Russi recalls, “sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll wasn’t enough. War was the ultimate drug.”

The perception in popular culture of war correspondents and image-makers is that they are 1) adrenaline junkies; 2) jaded about human suffering; and 3) cynical about human nature. The most recent example, Alex Garland’s 2024 provocation Civil War, centered on a seen-it-all photojournalist (Kirsten Dunst) heading to Washington, D.C. to snap the reactionary president before opposition forces can take him out. (An uneven blend of action flick and role-of-journalism inquiry, the film is even more relevant now than when it opened last April.)

Lawless (known for the TV series Xena: Warrior Princess and My Life is Murder) isn’t interested in peddling the anything-for-a-rush stereotype. Through Moth’s black-ink drawings and interviews with her siblings, she reveals a traumatic childhood with a bullying, alcoholic father and an equally resentful mother.

While the cameraperson wouldn’t talk about her past with anyone — born Margaret Wilson, she reinvented herself as Margaret Moth after fleeing New Zealand — the implication is she alchemized her upbringing into a determination to convey the plights of helpless innocents (especially children) in war zones. She got as close as she could with her camera, at great personal risk, to bear witness.

The grievous injury that Moth incurred on assignment — she was shot in the jaw while riding in a press vehicle through Sarajevo’s so-called Sniper Alley in 1992 — can’t be attributed to foolhardy behavior, however. Never Look Away devotes a considerable amount of time to her rehabilitation and recovery.

Moth survived and eventually returned to work, with perhaps even greater intensity. “She didn’t do less war after she got shot,” Kotsonis recalls. “She did more. She doubled down on war.”

Curiously, Never Look Away doesn’t give us anywhere near as much of Moth’s voice as we expect or want. Lawless includes fleeting bits of audio in the film’s first half; the few clips after Moss’s injury and reconstructive surgery illustrate that she lost the ability to speak clearly and powerfully.

Interviews with female peers like longtime CNN international correspondent Christiane Amanpour, producer Sausan Ghosheh and BBC camerawoman Susan Stein partially fill the void, and also offset the less-than-optimal experience of getting to know Margaret Moth through the main men in her life.

Yet our overall experience of her is a mediated one, filtered through other people’s eyes. If there’s anybody who you want to hear from directly, it’s the woman who smoked cigars with Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf in the evening during the first invasion of Iraq.

Nonetheless, we get a taste of both the necessity and the futility of shooting news video of casualties of war. Moth felt obligated to show their faces, knowing full well that there would be another war in another place next year, and another, and another.

“War is a tough job and we self-medicated,” Kotsonis says. “You walk away covered in suffering.”

‘Never Look Away’ plays Saturday, Feb. 8 at 12:15 p.m. as part of the Mostly British Film Festival at the Vogue Theater (3290 Sacramento St., San Francisco).