Year:2024

Runtime: 85 minutes

Directed by: Lucy Lawless

By Sarah Manvel

So the New Zealand action star of the deathless television show “Xena: Warrior Princess” has directed a movie about a New Zealand camerawoman who found her calling filming wars around the world. What Lucy Lawless has achieved in telling the story of Margaret Moth, who achieved her prominence as a camerawoman working for the early days of CNN, will provide herself with a riveting new career as a documentary filmmaker. In “Never Look Away” she brings a non-American-centric lens on a truly global story. For while Ms Moth’s story began in New Zealand, its key events happened in, among other places, Houston, Sarajevo, Paris and outside Beirut. This comfort with being out of your comfort zone remains somewhat unusual for women; we still aren’t expected to make our home in the world in the same way men have traditionally had the freedom to do. But this is only one aspect of how unusual Ms Moth’s life was, and Ms Lawless does a credible job of honoring all its aspects. 

Everyone talks about what an unusual and striking figure Ms Moth was, with her thick black eyeliner, Joan Jett haircut, capacity to operate without food or sleep for days at a time, secretive nature, and her fearlessness when filming under fire. Much of the scene-setting, news-footage montage, normal in documentaries, was shot by her, which provides a strange poignancy. She saw some truly awful things. In her personal life Ms Moth was also not the greatest: one ex-boyfriend from her days in Texas gives a thoughtful, loving interview that never shies away from how he was a teenager when they began dating. Another ex, a drug-addled Frenchman, recounts with some surprise how she could not understand why his new baby with his new partner would be an impediment to them getting back together. A man this personally sloppy, if you can call it that, would never have this held against them in a documentary about their career, of course, and Ms Lawless does the right thing in not holding it against Ms Moth. The intelligence of the interviewees – reputable journalists who didn’t earn their reputation by suffering fools, most notably Christiane Amanpour – and their obvious admiration of Ms Moth after all this time makes the complexity of her character and the depths of her achievements clear.  

But something truly awful happened to Ms Moth in Sarajevo, in the notorious Sniper Alley, which Ms Lawless re-enacts with a museum-style, bleached-out diorama under voiceover from the people who were also in that car. It somehow conveys the horror of that afternoon without resorting to anything more high-tech than the empathy of the audience, and the story suddenly shifts to how a person this independent coped with that independence’s loss. It’s always tricky, in life as in stories, when the actor becomes the acted-upon, but Ms Moth refused any of the easy and obvious choices and had the personal charisma to have her own way as much as anyone possibly could. Ms Lawless here announces herself as a filmmaker to watch and “Never Look Away” is an excellent debut.