This Is Not A Movie: Doc on Robert Fisk Examines The Fraught Business of Reporting on War

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B+

With his moving group portraits in Up the Yangtze and China Heavyweight, the Canadian director Yung Chang explored characters and predicaments that could easily be lifted from a drama or novel. By comparison, his new film This Is Not A Movie — an admiring profile of veteran English war correspondent Robert Fisk — is very much a one-man show.

Fisk, now in his seventies, lives in Beirut and writes for the English online newspaper The Independent. His coverage, which conflates eye-witness war zone–reporting and interpretative analysis, is often critical of U.S. and Israeli policies and always sympathetic to war's victims. That has made him a hero of the left and enemy of conservatives.

Shot over a couple of years, the film follows Fisk in war-torn Syria and the Israeli settlements while weaving in interviews with the subject and archival footage of a reporter who has covered every major Middle East war since 1976. Before that, he had already earned a reputation as a maverick reporter in his coverage of abuses by the English army in Northern Ireland.

We watch Fisk do a lot of hiking about through rubble and conflict zones, wearing one of many checked short-sleeve shirts with a satchel on his shoulder. He talks to officials, civilians, and soldiers (he's fluent in Arabic) and scratches down quotes on his pad. At home in Beirut, his apartment is filled with stacks of file folders and documents. Earlier in his journalism career, Fisk found time to get a PhD in political science from Trinity College, Dublin, which he credits for his insistence on primary documentation.

As the movie travels from country to country over Fisk's career, it's not always easy to follow the chronology. But overall, Mike Munn's editing is astute, covering decades of work and complex multi-party conflicts with as much clarity as could be reasonably hoped for.

Chang, who stays off-camera, shoots much of the film fly-on-the-wall style, folding in direct-to-camera interviews and voice-over, including a trove of archival video material and photographs from Fisk's almost 50-year career.

Fisk dismisses criticisms of his work — that he's anti-Israel or that he takes a pro-Russian/Syrian position because he travelled with the Syrian army. In April 2018, when the U.S., France, and the United Kingdom carried out missile strikes against Syria in response to reported chemical gas attacks on civilians in the city of Douma, Fisk raised credible doubts about whether those gas attacks really happened.

Sometimes his sweeping generalizations prove a little hard to swallow. In one scene, for example, he tells a group of students that in the Middle East, westerners who have "totally" lost their faith are oppressing Muslims who live according to God. Many religious Israelis and their American allies might be surprised to hear that.

A secondary theme of This Is Not A Movie is a look at the state of journalism today. We see Fisk talking to younger colleagues about the pros and cons of online versus traditional newsgathering. In fact, his own mixture of opinion and reportage for an online publication that has been called a "viewspaper" is not exactly traditional.

A more serious issue for our understanding of international relations is how tolerant newspapers can be of dissenting voices or willing to support a writer with the education and experience to put the news in historical context.

One of the formative experiences of Fisk's career was his coverage of the aftermath of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon, in which hundreds of Palestinian refugees, in sight of Israeli Defense Forces, were slaughtered over a 40-hour period by the Christian Phalangist militia. Fisk's experience, which gave him the only nightmares of his career, formed his belief that his duty was to tell the stories of victims.

In one scene, we see Fisk on the phone with an editor back in England, who wants to know what the reference to the massacre means. Fisk explains that he's referred to the history many times before in his copy. Finally, to cut the conversation short, he suggests the editor look it up on Google.

This Is Not A Movie. Directed by Yung Chang. Featuring Robert Fisk. Available May 8 through Blue Ice Docs.