Documentary ‘Endangered’ portrays journalists threatened in democratic countries

Journalists have children, dogs and wear pajamas. And they also hang out with the family on the couch.

If this mundane detail doesn’t deserve a front page in any newspaper, the portrait of journalists is humanized in the documentary “Endangered”, with scenes of domesticity in contrast to the routine of risk of death, rubber bullets and digital persecution such as the faced by Patrícia Campos Mello, from Sheetone of four reporters that the book follows, as of 2020.

In the first scenes of the film, which premiered on Sunday (12), at the Tribeca festival in New York, we hear the national anthem over images of Patrícia driving and then at a pro-Bolsonaro rally on Avenida Paulista. We’ve seen violent talk about the media—”these people have to be exterminated,” says one speaker.

She explains that Brazil is a young democracy in which press freedom is still fragile. And she recounts how she became the target of attacks by Jair Bolsonaro, the reason for a lawsuit she won against the president.

In addition to Patrícia, they accompany Mexican photojournalist Sáshenka Gutiérrez, photojournalist Carl Juste, from the Miami Herald newspaper, and British journalist Oliver Laughland, the Guardian’s US correspondent, who appears covering Donald Trump’s campaign and being harassed by supporters of the former. president.

The criteria for choosing the characters by the directors, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady — nominated for an Oscar for “Jesus Camp” (2006), about a summer camp in which children receive evangelical indoctrination — was the fact that the journalists belong to four democracies. , to better examine the decline in press freedom, compounded by the disappearance of local news companies in the US.

After the premiere session, the directors and four reporters were joined on stage in the movie theater by the film’s executive producer, author and journalist Ronan Farrow, son of Woody Allen and Mia Farrow.

Ewing stated that journalists do not like to give interviews or be in the news. Patricia agreed, but said she was pleased to see that the film shows that being a reporter is a job like any other, despite the risks. Haitian-born photographer Juste says he agreed to be filmed throughout the racial protests following the murder of George Floyd to leave a testimony for his son’s generation.

Juste and Patrícia appear in the documentary talking to their children, alert about the hostilities that are part of the reporters’ routine. Both have a sense of humor about parenting challenges. Patrícia’s son, who at the beginning of the recordings was seven years old, at one point triumphantly tells that he called a troll illiterate who made an online attack on his mother, writing in incorrect Portuguese.

The pandemic appears in the denialist speeches of Bolsonaro and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, president of Mexico. In Mexico City, by the way, Gutiérrez documents families of the dead weeping in a hospital.

The experience of the four journalists shows different aspects that give more clarity to the challenges of the profession in the present. Juste, who is black, documents racial violence. The British Laughland writes about the decline of American democracy since he moved to the country in 2014. Gutiérrez follows the acts of women against femicide that are the target of violent repression by the police. And Patricia recounts her experience of bullying and misogynistic attacks online, showing off grotesque memes on her cell phone.

Disinformation is highlighted, but the film misses the chance to show the role of social networks in the erosion of democracies, a theme that gave international projection to Patrícia, author of the book “A Máquina de Ódio”.

Farrow, famous as one of the reporters who denounced the sexual crimes of Harvey Weinstein, said that he recognized, in the problems faced by the Brazilian journalist, moments that he spent. In 2017, he said, the producer hired former Israeli secret service agents to spy on him. He then temporarily moved out of his apartment and was even advised to buy a gun.

“These are idiosyncratic problems,” he commented. You’re right. The risks taken by the four journalists in “Endangered” do not compare to plausible scenarios of intimidation in New York against Farrow, a prominent former State Department official under Barack Obama.