Young British film-maker Orban Wallace’s bluntly effective documentary about Europe’s refugee crisis averts its gaze from the graphic horrors broadcast on TV and across the internet, instead turning a critical eye to the journalists reporting on them.
It opens near the Serbian-Hungarian border in 2015, 674km from Germany, with an arresting image of Syrian refugees fleeing a camp, cast in the greenish shadows of night vision.
On the Greek island of Lesbos, the film-maker Wallace asks an American newscaster if these scenes will stay with him. His reply is whiplash-inducing: “Our next event could be the Venice film festival.” A heavily contoured Australian reporter curtly advises Wallace that he should film the refugees, not the journalists.
Wallace does film refugees, locating a human story in Mahasen, a bright and resourceful Syrian mother separated from her family. Yet, as its title hints, Another News Story is rather more invested in how ongoing global struggles are framed and discussed than in the struggles themselves.
