FILM REVIEWS:
NEVER LOOK AWAY (USA 2024) ***½
Directed by Lucy Lawless
The doc NEVER LOOK AWAY celebrates Margaret Moth, warts and all.
Born in Gisborne, New Zealand, as Margaret Wilson, she got her first camera at age 8.
She was the first news camerawoman in New Zealand, originally for the local DNTV2 station in the South Island before working for the national TVNZ channel. She changed her name to Margaret Gipsy Moth reportedly because of her love for parachuting from Tiger Moth airplanes and her desire to have her "own" name.
The doc initiates the audience to the woman with her first fling with a 17-year-old while she was 30. The doc then follows Moth as she moved to the United States and worked for KHOU in Houston, Texas, for about seven years before moving to CNN in 1990. Moth covered the Persian Gulf War, the rioting that followed Indira Gandhi's assassination, the civil war in Tbilisi, Georgia, and the Bosnian War. She had been described by colleagues as quirky, tough, fearless, and funny.
The doc works avoids being a biopic by omitting Margaret’s past. When the first boyfriend (the17 17-year-old), Jeff Russi asks Margaret about her past, her reply is that she had forgotten. So, no mention of her childhood is found in the doc.
Risks come with a price. No one is invincible - Margaret Moth included, In July 1992, Moth was shot and severely wounded while filming in Sniper Alley in Sarajevo. Because of this injury, considerable damage was done to her body, and her speech became slurred. Despite her injuries, she returned to work in Sarajevo six months later, joking that she was going back to look for her missing teeth.
War is the ultimate drug. Better than rugs like LCD and heroin that CNN photojournalist Margaret Moth partakes. CNN camerawoman Margaret Moth made the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Lebanon, and Operation Desert Storm in Iraq, real for North American television audiences. While her fellow journalists took cover, Moth ran towards danger, camera in hand, to get the shots. Colleagues including Christiane Amanpour attest to her bravery but it is Moth’s friends and lovers who reveal the self-destructive nature of the artist behind the lens. Innovative reconstructions of her near-lethal assignment in Sarajevo’s Sniper Alley, which turned Moth into headline news, are paired with unsettling interviews with witnesses to her daredevilry, forming the grit of this unconventional portrait. In her directorial debut, actor Lucy Lawless reveals the fearlessness of a fellow Kiwi woman The document ends with Moth being diagnosed with colon cancer and dying in the arms of an old friend fellow CNN cameraman
at the age of 59. The film’s ending minutes are spent concluding on the courage of the woman and the large impact her journalism had on stopping wars.
Director Lawless also goes personal, trying to understand the woman who faces danger and dismisses family life. What is behind her anger? Why is her background leading to this state?
If the name of the director Lucy Lawless sounds foamier, she is a famous New Zealand actress. She is best known for her roles as Xena in the television series Xena: Warrior Princess, as D'Anna Biers in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series, and as Lucretia in the television series Spartacus: Blood and Sand and associated series. Since 2019, she has starred as Alexa in the television series My Life Is Murder. NEVER LOOK BACK is her directorial debut.
Trailer:
