AFI FEST Los Angeles International Film Festival 2009

With a rapidly declining Fourth Estate, in-depth reporting is being substituted with opinion pieces masquerading as hard-hitting news. Eric Daniel Metzgar’s documentary follows two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof, plus an American student and a teacher, through a remote area in the Democratic Republic of the Congo during the summer of 2007. Acutely aware that “statistics deaden interest and compassion,” Kristof tries to get readers to care about pressing issues while shedding light on the atrocities occurring in Congo. But his coverage poses its own ethical dilemmas. Metzgar asks plenty of questions of his own while tracking Kristof on his bold visits to devastated communities and displacement camps. As Kristof files stories that “reflect the country’s desperate crisis and while mobilizing readers worldwide” to help the neediest around the globe, we see activist journalism at its best.

–Stacey Marbrey