The War Reporter Script

00.00
The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing. – Albert Einstein

00.03
THE WAR REPORTER

00.06
IRAQ, 2003
From Adler’s DV tapes/rushes

00.23
A Film About Martin Adler

00.34
Directed and Edited By Thomas Nordanstad

00.43
The place is cool

00.52
Down! Get Down!

00.58
No, Down! Get Down! Down!

01.11
Homeland security, homeland fucking security

01.23
Get Down!

01.33
Show me your hands! Show me your hands!

01.44
Show me your hands now!

01.45
I haven’t done anything!

01.49
Give me your hands or I swear I will kill you!

01.53
You get it?

01.54
I’ll take you over there and I will shoot you in the head!

02.00
Do you understand what I am saying to you?

02.13
Aston – Mogadishu, Somalia.
June 22, 2006

02.14
This is the filmmaker and reporter Martin Adler. The picture is taken on the day before he was killed. On June 23 2006.

02.29
Aceh, Indonesia
March 1999

02.29
He was 48 years old and had two daughters and a wife in Sweden.

02.43
Someone has said that the first casualty of war is the truth. This is a film about a man who spent his life looking for that truth through the lens of his film camera.

03.10
Outside Samarra, Iraq,
August, 2003

03.22
What’s his deal?

03.24
First sergeant think his “Fejadeen”

03.26
No, he’s not “Bidaheen”.

03.31
No, this motherfucker knows what he’s seen but he farts at us, and he’s not willing to talk

03.54
I think Martin’s is kind of the best kind of storytelling

03.56
Tina Carr,
The Rory Peck Trust, London

03.56
because it’s the kind of storytelling where he doesn’t actually tell you the story, he allows the story to develop and he allows people to show themselves for what they are
04.25
Rolf Porseryd
Foreign Correspondent, TV4, Sweden.

04.48
Baghdad – Falluja
Iraq, 2003

05.11
Moscow – Grozny
1995

05.17
Western China
2000

05.18
Martin travelled for more than 15 years as a freelancer to nearly 40 countries in various stages of conflict.

05.25
Kabul-Kandahar
Afghanistan, 2001

05.26
He wrote in a journal he kept when he was young back in Sweden, “I want to go to the places nobody else is going to and I want to listen to the people nobody else is listening to”.

05.44
Peshawar
Pakistan, 2001

05.50
Kakata – Monrovia
Liberia, 2003

06.02
Congo- - Kinshasa
2004

06.08
Lagos, Nigeria
1999

06.18
Kampala, Uganda
2002

06.27
Niger Delta, Nigeria
2004

06.35
Brazzaville
2000

06.55
Tirana, Albania
2005

07.03
He was able to research the story, he was able to film it, he was able to, to narrate it, to produce it, to edit it, and, you know, I think he felt that he could do that best, alone.

07.18
And you’ve changed his life forever, sincerely..

07.23
“The Rock” American base, Baghdad

07.40
You know what, I see an Iraqi with a weapon outside and I just shoot him. I love this place, this place is great.

07.45
We’re here, we’re not leaving for a while. Come pay us a visit.

08.15
Baghdad, Iraq,
Spring of 2003

08.58
Can you relate to Rock 6; the guy we got has black hair –

09.02
he is two years younger…and…

09.07
first name and middle name matches but the last name doesn’t match…

09.28
Sit!

09.48
Let’s go.

09.52
The lady claims his leg is broken…
It’s not broken. We get this all the time

10.30
Put all the women in here.

10.52
We need ID’s on these two males…

11.29
Just take it.
No you didn’t
It took!


12.08
I hope there’s some solace in knowing

12.10
Ron McCullagh
Insight News/Channel 4
Commissioning Editor

12.11
that Martin was doing what he felt was right for him and right for the people that he filmed, were the subjects of his films, and indeed right for society because he genuinely believed that society was better when they knew more.

12.30
Making of the film “Charlie Company”
Iraq, 2003

12.31
This, this this village, we’re at here, what what is the name of the village and why are we here?

12.33
Um, to tell you the truth I don’t even know the name of the village.

12.38
You guys are free to go in.

12.39
Fantastic, thank you.

12.40
So who is this you think you have here?

12.42
Is this the chief suspect?

12.43
I dunno, his name’s Akhmed I dunno who he is.

12.47
Ok.

12.49
My job is to go in, find the bad guys and kill them.

12.53
Martin Adler spent ten days with Charlie Company, a unit of US Fourth Inventory Division, at the very centre of operations in the Sunni triangle.

13.04
Hey, lay the fuck down! Lay the fuck down! Lay the fuck down!

13.10
It’s two in the morning, American soldiers are searching for a local resistance leader. Routing out the resistance in Iraq is a messy business.

13.22
What I saw was, was basically a whole series of gratuitous acts of violence. It’d alienate a whole village or a whole extended family by, you know, entering these peoples houses by force, in the middle of the night, getting the women folk out of the bedrooms and basically humiliating them. There’s a sense of a successful hunt, the first sergeant came up to me and said “Hey Martin, isn’t this great, God I love my job”, you know, this and, you know, and he was just, and they were all incredibly happy and somehow they wanted to record this, this achievement, you know.

13.53
You don’t think it’s a risk going into people’s houses like that that it might make them more scared of you and sort of more, anti-American?

14.07
Not really.

14.10
It takes determination, in fact, it takes dedication, for freelancers to pursue the work, which we honour here tonight. And the deserving winner

14.19
Winning the Rory Peck Award
For “Charlie Company” 2004

14.19
of his award is Martin Adler.

14.36
First soundcheck
Ten years earlier, 1994, Sweden

14.39
1,2,3, testing testing, testing. Can we get some volume here or not? Put it on, checking the video and see what’s happened, how it is and if it’s ok or not. I will do that now and we will see you, ok?

14.56
He was kind of a full-grown war reporter, that’s how I, I kind of felt about him. It’s not like you wondered

15.02
Asne Seierstad
Writer
Travelled with Adler in Chechnya

15.02
“How come this guy ended up as a war reporter?”, like it was not the kind of guy who could have been anything else. This was his life and he went after the stories and he went after the stories and he had been to several wars and his stories that he told

15.15
Chechnya
1995

15.15
were about those wars.

15.41
Grozny, Chechnya
1995

16.13
He had a Russian translator who was, that scared, he was even more scared than I was. And at the time when the Chechnyans, were, well they, they didn’t have, I mean, Chechyan rebels – they were not very happy that he had a Russian translator at all, er, so at times I was the one translating, er, being a foreigner we were kind of on the side or good enough for the Chechnyans but, er he was very aware of all this and very polite and like he was not a pusher to get things from them even though he had that aim. What I remember the most is that he knew what kind of stories he wanted.

17.46
I wanted to be closer to Martin, we all did, than we ever got, because there was always a little distance there, there was always a sense that…he, he had his own world, his own, his own friendships, his own family, his own loves. And and he, he was a cool guy. His, his position was very much was, “I’ve got a job to do, I’m gonna make sure I do it properly…and I’m very interested in getting the results that we all want, which is to get this shown, seen by a large number of people around the world.

18.20
Afghanistan 2001
 
18.28
What did he say?
He said “You are not allowed to talk to them”.

19.58
There’s a different, direction within the photography that Martin was doing, er where

20.04
Adrian Evans
Panos Pictures
Martin Adler’s still image agency

20.05
conflict photographers are putting their photographs on the walls of galleries. I don’t think that, that that they’re actually taking different images, it’s just where the images go to after they’ve been produced, and Martin’s would stand beside any any gallery show. He never really considered himself someone who was shooting for his pictures to go on walls, er but they have that, they have that power. Those that are most memorable aren’t what I would call ‘Bang Bang Photographs’, they’re not the frontline with guns going off with bullets flying, that’s not it. It’s more about the intersection between daily life and conflict, those are the ones that really stick in my mind, and we were looking at some earlier, for instance the one for Grozny of women sweeping the ground in the middle of an absolutely destroyed city. There’s almost a pointlessness about what they’re doing but also some degree of hope in that they continue to try and prettify and make nice their environment and the place that they live in, erm, or the picture from Georgia which I think is early 90s from Abkazia where there’s a sleeping soldier and a woman just leaning up against the wall besides the sleeping soldier and they’re almost completely disconnected. Or one in Liberia where he really was in the thick of the fighting in Monrovia and that was a hairy situation, but the picture that sticks out for me is one where he was moving down through a building that was being fought over or was a point from which, was a firing point within the conflict. He just turned this corner and there was a fighter standing there holding a baby, and he has this photograph of a man with an AK47 – a Liberian rebel – holding this baby in one hand, almost defying gravity cos it looks like a weightless baby because of the way the man is holding the baby. Why was the baby there? I assume people were living there as well as it being a firing point but it is a surreal image and I think that’s what he was good at, finding those little surreal touches.

22.14
Another image from Southern Sudan, a place he also went to on a number of occasions, of a woman walking through a flooded area – I don’t know where but I think it’s a flooded area, there’s lots of lilies in the water – and she’s naked from the waist up, she’s carrying an AK47. You kind of in a way don’t even see the AK47, I mean it’s clear as day yet for some reason you don’t really spot the AK47, it’s more what she’s carrying on her head, she’s carrying her lunch, her food, her possessions and she’s also completely alone, he was very good at finding the individual within a mass situation and that’s….that’s an art in itself.

23.20
I think what comes through in Martin’s work IS the fact that he’s by himself and working alone and is also the fact he really does leave space and he leaves space for the picture and the story to develop and he leaves space for whoever he is dealing with, who knows what questions he’s prompted them with. He never seems to interfere, the question never seems to stop.

23.56
He became very good very quickly, I mean, ridiculously quickly – within two films. As soon as he had access to the craft, knowledge, he just, he was like a vacuum cleaner, he just completely took it in. And the result of that was this incredible closeness he managed to get with the people he worked with, because Martin was very much a person  journalist he wasn’t the sort of, what’s often called, protocol journalism – he didn’t deal with them in the stirs of the important people, he dealt with the ordinary people, who of course are the important people, whose stories and perspective are completely different from those we normally hear, I mean, he was, classically, a bottom up journalist.

25.14
That’s both of them?
That’s it, that’s both of them.

25.19
We were all fairly much confident that Martin knew what he was doing when he went abroad and he went on those dangerous missions, and after he’s been on sort of 30 or 40 missions….something like t hat…you think this guy, he’s untouchable. He’s gonna be ok. But in the end, you know, he wasn’t and then, then you think, you think back on, on all the other times and then you realise that maybe he wasn’t that safe, you know, there was always – you know what Martin was prepared for, he was prepared for everything apart from  being shot in the back by a coward.

26.02
Monrovia, Liberia
Civil War, 2003

26.30
So how many rounds of water was in that…was it three or was it…

26.33
Three.

26.33
Yep.

26.56
Yes good afternoon, who is that? Bakhshi, sorry I can’t talk to you now, we we we we’ve just come out of the shelling here so I’ll speak to you later ok? We’re on the road, it’s really dangerous. Speak to you later, shells are falling…what? Ok, oh shit, ok just stop stop stop stop stop.

27.52
West African nation of Liberia has descended still further into anarchy and chaos. Martin Adler witnessed the battle and brings us this exclusive report, which does contain some disturbing images.

28.10
They may not look like an official Government army but that’s what they are. Forces loyal to Charles Taylor in an abandoned market place near the Centre of Monrovia. They are returning fire from rebel held territories on the other side of the Mensarada River.

28.27
Our people are dying, what can we do?

28.31
But the promise of a stepped up US presence off the coast of Liberia is likely to be seen as too little too late by the residents of this war torn city.

28.45
We are finished! We are finished!

28.28
Man what the fuck! We are fighting for our fucking lives! For the president of the republic of Liberia!



30.02
My name is General Rush Hour – yes General Rush Hour.

30.04
Rush Hour?

30.05
Yes Rush Hour. I’m going to kill LURD rebels doors to doors, and eat their hearts!

31.36
Monrovia, Liberia
2010

31.41
The first time was World War One…the second was World War Two and the third time was World War Three when I met Martin Adler in July of 2003. And er actually when I met him he was working alone with another guy, he was a fixer and travelled for him also, taking him around places

32.02
Oliver Zayza
“Fixer”
with Martin in Monrovia 2003

and arranging interviews with, with most of the rebel commanders. But the guy said that he had a family and that Martin Adler was too brave and he couldn’t risk his life because he was not insured so he decided to quit the job. So right at that time someone recommended me to Martin Adler, I had a job at the time and I met Martin Adler and then we started working together.

32.32
Martin Adler has been in Liberia throughout the worst of the violence in the capital city Monrovia.

32.45
We wronged you Liberia. We wronged you Lord.

33.00
Monrovia, Liberia
2003

33.01
Drive! Drive! Drive Oliver!

33.08
We actually came to a point where a…rocket dropped just a few kilometres from us and I have to drive to a house in the middle of stray bullets and some villains started to be hit by stray bullets…so we found our way back it was a little bit difficult for journalists sometimes cos most of the people fighting were not educated…not many knew the value…maybe not many knew who journalists are so most of the time journalists got harassed by some of the fighting forces so working Liberia was a little bit difficult. Martin Adler contributed to the Liberian peace process in a sense that they kept information to the international community cos with all journalists you can know what’s going on in the world.

36.39
The ECOMOC forces are coming to Monrovia. Battles are raging down by the bridge here…It seems there are…

36.55
This is cease fire in Liberia. IF this is peace in the country…it is a country in ruins and chaos…

37.15
Well I think Martin, he had, he had a very secure life at home in Sweden with his wife, his two children and his parents and lots of friends and I think the reason that he carried on going out and taking these risks…was his desire to prove to himself that he could do this, he could do these things, he could, he could go to these parts of the world where nobody else dared to go.

37.54
He told me that sort of in his early thirties he always worked in this trade

37.59
Ola Rollen
Long time friend

37.59
but more and more he became addicted trying to unravel what’s going on in different parts of the globe and actually report it as it is to make a change. I think it became bad for him, he needed to do that, he got addicted to it

38.22
Soldier’s camp
Chechnya, 1995

38.23
and that’s what drove him, I, I, deep down I don’t think he recorded himself as a journalist but probably more trying to make a change to, to things in life. All the disadvantaged people he met and came across, trying to actually make a change in the areas.

38.49
Martin was an unusual journalist in that he had

38.52
Mark Stucke
Director
Journeyman Pictures, London

38.52
none of the rough edges, he, he wasn’t the lads lad. He wasn’t the guy who was going to

39.01
Grozny, Chechnya 1995
Missing Persons Register

39.04
stay up until three or four in the morning drinking. People respected Martin straight away, he had that aura about him. He was intelligent and he had a very clean crisp way of communicating. He was quiet and not larger than life so he never intimidated his subjects, he set his stories up very well, people wanted to help him so a conversation here would very quickly get through to his subjects and they would be very happy to invite him into their world and work with him.

39.42
He was definitely a European, a modern European man but with this English, slightly emotionally suppressed…which was not in any way damaging to his nature or who he was but, he was reserved. He had that English reserve. He wasn’t quick to share his emotions. You know, whilst we talk about that sort of English, slightly repressed approach, the truth was that you can’t do the work that Martin did by behaving like that with the people you’re working with because the way these films are made is through integrity and trust.

40.35
General Hospital
Grozny, Chechnya, 1995

41.30
Those faces and the way they respond to  his lens, I mean, you can see immediately that the relationship…that’s how you can tell. And so much of filmmaking

41.44
Ron McCullagh
Insight News/Channel 4
Commissioning Editor

41.44
is about how we, behind the camera, relate to the people in front of the camera and that relationship is reflected back into the lens. And so the audience rarely see the whole process but that’s what’s happening.

42.04
Day of the Russian Invasion
Grozny, Chechnya, 1995

42.04
And you can either do that or you can’t and, and a great filmmaker isn’t just somebody who moves the camera and who knows where the camera should be. A great filmmaker is someone who can release the characters and personalities that are the subjects of their documentaries. Release them so that they can be in that film, who they are. And that was very much what Martin was capable of, establishing that trust.

42.55
Guatemala City, Guatemala
“The Baby Business”, 2000

Ruth Noemi Larios
Mother of stolen baby

42.59
When I looked around they grabbed my baby, they picked her up and they carried her off. I went running after them. A friend called out, “Don’t go because they will shoot you”.

43.28
Talk about newborns.

43.31
How old is this one? Is this a girl or a boy?

43.35
Secret filming.

43.36
Cindy…

43.47
The only ones that are available are these which just came in. This year we have a lot of people calling, from England, Spain. They call, they just keep calling us…

44.30
If you’re going to go somewhere very tough, very difficult

44.33
Lisbon, Portugal
“Heroin districts”, 2001

44.33
you know its not the, the Golden Beaches and tourist spots where freelance journalists material is going to come from, not if he’s actually going to survive off it, which Martin did – it’s the tough spots, its places full of hostile people,

44.54
Secret filming

44.54
full of hostile conditions and you have to be the consummate professional to actually successfully exploit that situation.

45.06
Secret filming

45.07
You have to be absolutely self-efficient, able to rely on your own resources. It’s extremely dangerous and, well, as much as Martin was a consummate professional and didn’t die from a mistake he made as far as I can understand, the reason for his success is kind of contradiction to the fact that he did die at the end of the day. Because he was not the guy who made mistakes which resulted in their…having an accident.

45.41
560
SOMALIA: CAMERAMAN
Duration: 1.43
Date Shot: June 23, 2006
Natural/Somali/Part mute
TV & Web Restrictions: None

REUTERS
KNOW.NOW

45.45
Mogadishu, Somalia
June 23, 2006

45.49
We see nothing.

45.50
Flemming Weiss-Andersen
Photographer/Writer
Cairo, Egypt

45.50
We only see what is in the lens when we photograph, we don’t see what is around us and when Martin and I were standing there looking through our lenses we were seeing so little, as an actual fact…so… I heard…we heard this extremely high bang…

46.22
When I had touched him I think I started yelling, or I tried to start yelling, “Help somebody must help Martin, please help Martin”…something like that…but then my…my voice was very weak…and erm…I do remember that after this attempt to yell, and I did cry out some, that Martin turns his head towards me maybe to see how I were. And now the very strange thing was also that these Islamic Court Union Guards who had been standing right in front of us, I mean this is one metre, something like that, really in front of us; they were totally gone…I..I don’t…they were totally gone, I couldn’t see them. I was expecting help from them which was part of me yelling but probably they had seeked shelter.  

48.31
And after that you…I felt pretty helpless of course. Sam Rice was up there, from The Guardian, and of course you had all those…up there, this was a perfect spot to make a killing of a journalist because this would be out, aired, immediately they had their phones to ABC, Al Jazeera, BBC, everything.

49.09
They tried to keep us down but eventually we saw that he was taken away to the hospital and as I had misunderstood the situation and thought he had been hit down here and not up here, I actually was pretty hopeful that this was not so serious.

49.42
I couldn’t imagine Martin, you know, sitting in a rocking chair with a blanket over his knees, you know, no I can’t imagine that. He will never experience life reduced, he will always have lived life to its full potential. And that gives me comfort.

50.09
The one thing he cared about was dying with dignity. He wanted to die with dignity and I think he did. He did die a hero and he’s been, kind of, he’s become a legend. Definitely, he’s become a legend and I think, in those moments he would have thought, “Fair enough”. Those would have been his thoughts, I don’t think he would have thought, “Oh why is this happening to me?”. He wouldn’t have thought that, he would have thought, “Fair enough, I took this risk. Thank you, you know, for the time I’ve had”.

50.45
It’s usually indiscriminate when a journalist dies. It’s usually because they’re in the wrong place, wrong time, an explosion…you know…a random shot…the directness of this attack intended to be and was highly offensive and personal…not that it was personal to Martin but that it was personal to any foreigner who was Mogadishu on that day, from that person’s perspective. So, you know, did he know that that was a possibility – yes he did. And did he accept that was part of the risk he took every time he went into a place like Somalia – yes he did. Does that mean he was wrong to do it? Well in that case let’s just close down international journalism. Let’s put up the shutters, let’s make fortress Europe. Let’s switch off the lights as far as we’re all concerned and the rest of the world and what sort of world would we have?

52.12
Directed and Edited By
Thomas Nordanstad

52.30
Produced By
Anders Palm

52.47
Original Score and Music By
Jean-Louis Huhta

53.04
Executive Producer
Ola Rollen

53.06 – 53.19
Additional filming:
Monrovia:
Marcus Bleasdale

M.Adler interview:
Richard Pendry

Production Assistant
Charlotte Rueckl

Sound/Post Production
Per Nystrom/Chimney Pot

A Silent Film LTD Production

For Prime Ad, Sweden

Nordanstad Films inc.