(The Daily Star)- “Keep your headphones in so we can communicate,” Jesse Rosenfeld shouted into the microphone. “If people decide they hate the press we’re going to have to get the f---k out of here.” “Freelancer on the Front Lines,” a new documentary by Santiago Bertolino released at the Montreal Film festival last month, opens with Bertolino and Rosenfeld winding through chaotic Cairo streets on the eve of the election of Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi.
The doc seeks to explore the world of freelance journalists in the Middle East, looking in on a dozen flashpoints from the last three years. The changing landscape of both the region and the media industry is seen through the eyes of Rosenfeld, a Beirut-based freelance journalist with nearly a decade of reporting under his belt.
The film runs as a series of vignettes, diving into well-trod stories and throwing the viewer into the chaos of Egyptian elections, front-line standoffs between Iraqi peshmerga and Daesh (ISIS), and the buildup to Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza.
“For me, what was very important was telling the story of the Middle East right now,” Rosenfeld told The Daily Star shortly before heading back to his native Canada for the film’s premiere. “Bertolino was very interested to show what it was like to do freelance journalism in this environment. Hopefully what comes through from the film is an implicit link between these places. “The opening point of the film,” he added, “is the counterrevolution in Egypt, the rollback on the Arab Spring and the different faces that it took.”
The film listens in on Rosenfeld’s interviews and conversations with people on the ground. The narrative is driven by ordinary people, officials, other journalists and – most importantly for the western journalists in the region – his fixers.
He never hides the importance of these key, and often unsung, resources to writers and reporters. You see Rosenfeld negotiating with his fixers to line up his interviews, gain access and translate from the multitude of languages he moves through in Turkey, Iraq, Egypt and Palestine. “[We wanted to] show how the hell you can [tell the stories] without anyone backing you,” he said.
Each vignette or influential moment ends with Rosenfeld’s published story filling the screen, his voiceover reading the text as he appears to type it out onto the newspaper’s webpage – his primary client being the Daily Beast.
The juxtaposition of the conversation he’s just had, the scene he’s just witnessed and the published story places viewers alongside the journalists. In the era of post-truth reporting and fake news, it’s a refreshing look behind the headlines and a chance to see the work of reporters abroad, warts and all.
“The project for the film began with a personal desire to know the situation on the ground,” Bertolino explained, “to meet people, to better understand the political situation, to try to see the difference between reality and media coverage. At the time, I had not yet made a feature-length documentary and I could not yet imagine that it would take three years to realize this movie.”
For an industry of people that tell stories for a living, many movies and docs about journalism – especially in conflict zones – end up as voyeuristic, glamorized adventure tales of western protagonists vacationing in other peoples’ problems. Bertolino and Rosenfeld have avoided that trope.
It is unclear how this is accomplished. It may be the long waits in hotel rooms as Rosenfeld tries to set up stories (that fall through) or the voices of his informants, which drive the film.
While the story is nominally about Rosenfeld, it co-stars his faceless Daily Beast editor in the U.S., who appears only via email and Skype conversations. It is equally about the taxi drivers, refugees, soldiers and ordinary students Rosenfeld meets along the way.
Throughout the film, Bertolino remains the disembodied voice off whom Rosenfeld bounces ideas. The pair exchange frank, sometimes tense, conversations. This is exemplified when an exasperated Rosenfeld demands Bertolino decide about joining a Peshmerga patrol to the Daesh front line. Fear and stress mingle into an authentic cocktail.
“Freelancer” never tries to add sex appeal to the work. It never portrays director or protagonist as fearless, gung ho swashbucklers. The decisions they make are real and discussed at length. Consequently the viewer feels ever-present in the process.
While the film is about the Middle East, Bertolino also meets Rosenfeld post-assignment as he sits at home in snowy Canada. It follows him through the streets as he talks about the horrors he witnessed in the Gaza war, as he plans his next trip and as he says goodbye to his parents at the airport.
At the Montreal International Documentary Film Festival, Rosenfeld explained, the two screenings were sold out and audiences stayed for over an hour both times for a long Q&A. The pair now plan to take the film to other festivals before a general theater release in the spring.
Bertolino films Rosenfeld even when there’s nothing much to film. In doing so he captures the essence of freelancing in this region – the long periods of waiting and dozens of phone calls as well as the unpredictable political landscape.
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