The Oscar-nominated co-director of the 2010 film “Restrepo,” Tim Hetherington was killed on Wednesday (April 20) during a battle between rebel and government forces in Misrata, Libya. The award winning photographer and documentary filmmaker was also the co-producer of “Restrepo”, which won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. His latest publishing project was “Infidel”, an intimate portrait of a U.S. platoon stationed in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. The images were made over the course of one year while Hetherington and Junger were filming “Restrepo”.

Hetherington was born in Liverpool, England in 1970 and studied literature and photojournalism. He resided in New York and collaborated as a photographer for the magazine Vanity Fair. He’s received several awards for his work as a cinematographer, director and producer. Hetherington covered West Africa as a photographer and a collection of his work is in the book “Long Story Bit by Bit: Liberia Retold.” He won four World Press Photo awards, including the World Press Photo of the Year (2007), and an Alfred I. duPont Award in broadcast journalism while on assignment with Sebastian Junger for ABC News (2009).

Vanity Fair sent Hetherington, along with Sebastian Junger (who pitched the story) in 2007 to document a year with an American battalion in Afghanistan. The assignment led to “Restrepo,” which earned the film an Oscar nomination in the documentary category.

American journalist Sebastian Jungeris the author of “The Perfect Storm”, “Fire” and “A Death in Belmont”. Junger has reported for Vanity Fair from many war zones across the world: Monrovia during the Liberian civil war in 2003, Sierra Leone during the civil war of 2000, and Niger in 2006. He has also won an Alfred I.duPont Broadcast Award for his cinematography while embedded with American soldiers for ABC News.

Junger first reported from Afghanistan in 1996 and in 2001, Junger returned to Afghanistan to witness the overthrow of the Taliban and the beginning of American and NATO involvement in that country.

His Vanity Fair report on war crimes prosecutions in Kosovo (“The Forensics of War”) won him a National Magazine Award for Reporting in 1999. Hetherington won the photojournalism World Press Photo of the Year award during his time with Battle Company.

Interview with Nick Quested, Exective Producer of Restrepo

During last October’s edition of the Morelia International Film Festival, Anne Wakefield had the opportunity to talk to Restrepo’s executive producer Nick Quested about the experience of working with Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington.

Nick Quested.-The topography of the Korengal Valley is very extreme. It is at very high altitude. It is a pine forest on the mountains and they have a certain amount of farming in the valleys and there are few people who live there. The other thing about the valley is that it is a very different ethnic group from the valley that is next to it and they have been resisting outside influences for three thousand years, so the  culture of resistance is firmly entrenched and they are not interested in sawmills or money: they just want to live their life. And the first thing the Americans did when they went into the valley was to take over their sawmill and turn it into their headquarters, and since their main business is lumber, this immediately deprived them of their main source of income. Therefore, I do not know how good that was as far as customer relations.

cinePhiles.- How dangerous was this mission in comparison to other wars or conflict zones they had covered.

NQ.-They all have their different levels of danger, different kinds of danger too. When Tim and Sebastian were in Sierra Leone or in Niger they had to deal with amateurs. People who were drugged in some cases and could just go crazy suddenly. Whereas the Taliban are good shots, they are professionals.   We shot the film on location in Afghanistan and 3 months later followed the platoon to Italy where they could reflect on their past experiences on camera.

cinePhiles-Hetherington did both the still photographs and video?  How complicated was that?

NQ.-Yes, you can hear the shutter of his still camera on the video. It was a Sony V1,Tim shot on a Z1. For the most part, he held the camera at chest-level in  autofocus.

cinePhiles.- In contrast to “Armadillo,” a Dutch film about the war in Afghanistan, which was also nominated for an Oscar this year, the tone in Restrepo is optimistic. There is an uplifting quality in your film that is nowhere to be seen in Armadillo: the American soldiers do not have any doubts about their mission presence in Afghanistan.

NQ.-The soldiers do not doubt the mission because it is their reality and they do not talk about the mission while they are going through it; they can’t afford to, they would not survive if they had any doubts.  Later on, three months after we left the Korengal Valley in August ‘08, we set up a little studio in Italy and there we asked them to talk about what they had been through. We thought by then that the most powerful  material was the footage from the war zone. But these guys were able to talk about their emotional state in a way that they couldn’t afford during combat. And it became the emotional heart of the movie. They talked to us as if we were one of them.

NQ.-Sebastian and Tim spent so much time there and were involved in every aspect of the deployment over the fifteen months that they were accepted as one of the platoon to a large extent.Sebastian tore his Achilles tendon there and stayed for another few days. And Tim on operation Rock Avalanche In Operation Rock Avalanche (an extremely dangerous mission captured in the film), which actually lasted close to ten days;  but on the fifth day, Tim broke his leg and they gave him two bottles of water cause the patrol had to move on, and he had to walk off the mountain down on to the village with a broken leg: it was like touching the void.  And then when he is trying to get on the helicopter they told him to get up on this building over there and the helicopter lands on this other building over there, and he has and there is like a plank and at the top at the mountain and he had to go down on his butt and get to the helicopter and have a doctor tell him: Your leg is broken, but you are fine. Just tie your boots very tight and will pick you up tomorrow morning.

Click here to listen to the original audio:

cinePhiles.-Gosh, how could he go through that? Is he very athletic and used to hardship?

NQ.-Yes, they both are, very fit. They have a high tolerance of adversity.

cinePhiles.-Would you say it is an apolitical film?

NQ.- It is an apolitical film. It just presents things as they are. It not meant to be judgmental.

Filmography

Cinematographer

2010 Diary (documentary short) (post-production)

2010 Restrepo (documentary)

2007 The Devil Came on Horseback (documentary)

2004 Liberia: An Uncivil War (TV documentary)

Director

2010 Diary (documentary short) (post-production)

2010 Restrepo (documentary)

Producer

2010 Diary (documentary short) (co-producer) (post-production)

2010 Restrepo (documentary) (producer)

Camera and Electrical Department

2010/II Invisible (short) (additional photography)

Self

2010 Diary (documentary short) (post-production)

2010 Breakfast (TV series)