Love+War (2025) Movie Script
1
How about behind that wall?
Get down.
It's locked?
Uh, this is Lynsey Addario
in the village of Novoluhanske.
We're being shelled.
Why is a woman just standing there?
They're outgoing now or incoming?
That was incoming.
- It's incoming.
- Yeah.
Okay?
Oh, my God, are they crazy?
She's not worried about her child?
Come, come, come,
come, come, come, come!
Where is the front line?
- Where I am?
- That direction.
Well, this probably isn't
the best place, is it?
Thank you.
She doesn't want
to stay down here?
Can I take her photo?
What's her name?
We wake up this morning
to a war in Europe.
The first targets hit with cruise
and ballistic missiles
in and around Kyiv, the capital.
Oh, Jesus.
It's a boy and still don't have name.
The building next to my house.
In the first time in my life,
I do not know what to do.
That's crazy.
And you're a teacher?
Are you scared?
Of course.
Of course.
Lynsey, where are you right now?
I'm in Kyiv.
Things are getting very tense.
You're in the center
of the city, and it's a target.
Why are you staying there?
Because, uh, you know,
it's sort of, when you do this,
I think we've learned
that you want to be where,
like, sort of power in numbers.
All the journalists together.
That's what we've... There's...
It's not like there's anywhere
particularly that's safe.
We've seen instances
all over the country
where the Ukrainians have
really pushed back...
When the New York Times asked
if there is a war in Ukraine,
would you like to cover it?
I jumped on the opportunity.
I didn't have to think
very long because I knew
it would be a really historic moment.
And there's just, like,
a whole underground operation,
literally in the bunker.
What did he say?
Okay, let's go quick.
I started working with Andriy Dubchak
before the war started.
In Ukraine,
he's a very well-known photographer
and videographer.
And what is the name of this weapon?
He's basically my partner.
Okay, let me see.
So we have some dried foods.
The cookies. Because every time
we go to the grocery store,
I buy cookies.
A sleeping mat in case
you guys end up in the bunker.
We have water in the tub
in case they cut the water.
We can flush the toilet.
Or we could take a bath with that.
Any good news? Bad news?
There's smoke. A lot of smoke.
- Look.
- A lot of smoke, yeah.
So we can't see it.
So can you situate me for a second?
Yeah. So basically... Yeah.
So, obviously, that's
the front line over there.
You can hear the small arms fire,
and it sounds like
anti-tank weapons going off.
So that may be the start of the assault.
- Yeah.
- I suggest we start moving.
- Okay.
- Let's go.
Come on.
They let the man go right in front.
They don't like to see women here.
I always get kicked away.
You can go where you want.
It's like the story of my life.
- Just here, less exposure.
- Yeah.
They're fucking aiming
at the civilians?
Yep.
Shit.
Where'd that land?
Fuck, right by the people.
Shit!
Shit, shit, shit, shit.
Shit! Am I bleeding?
Am I bleeding?
- No, no.
- Alright.
- Stay there!
- Alright.
Come on! Medic!
Medic!
Oh, fuck, it's a person.
Be careful.
They're really sensitive. Move!
- Oh!
- Come on...
- You stay.
- Oh, fuck!
Fucking killing civilians.
I fucking hate these bastards.
Lynsey, go, go.
Get down.
The chances of further escalation
and bloodshed keep growing.
I messaged my editor
lobbying to publish the picture
because I witnessed
this civilian evacuation route
be targeted intentionally.
That's a war crime.
But none of us knew who
the people were in the photos.
What if there's a family member
that finds out because of your photograph?
President Putin speaking today...
They had to make the decision
whether to go with that risk or not.
In terms of the military tactics,
they're doing everything they can
to avoid loss of civilian life
in Ukrainian cities.
I made the case
that this is exactly
when Putin was saying that
he was not targeting civilians.
And I said I was in this attack.
It was intentional.
- Stay there!
- Alright.
That photograph did end up opening
the eyes of many people in the world
as to the consequences of Putin
going in to a sovereign country
and firing on a civilian population.
Vladimir Putin has repeatedly denied
his forces are targeting civilians.
But on Sunday, the world saw
the truth for itself.
This image
was published on the front page
of The New York Times today.
It is the unsanitized view of war.
In Ukraine, one picture
has starkly illustrated
the cost of the conflict.
The photo was taken
by Pulitzer Prize-winning
photojournalist Lynsey Addario.
And it's become one of
the defining images of this war.
It was even used as an exhibit
in a speech on the Senate floor
by Dick Durbin.
I've covered so many wars,
but it was probably the first time
that there was such a visceral,
widespread reaction
to one of my photographs.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, I remember
she was wearing this.
Oh, Jesus.
Mm-hmm.
We will stop
on the petrol station, okay?
- Yep.
- You drink coffee maybe
- if you like.
- Okay.
We are going to Balice,
to the airport, right?
- Or to the hotel?
- To Krakow. Airport.
I'm trying to go to
my son's music concert tonight.
Oh, super.
Gigante
Hey
Let me take you to the zoo
Zoo, zoo, zoo zoo, zoo, zoo
Zoo, zoo, zoo zoo, zoo, zoo
I like the way you do it me gusta
Stop! No seas tan adusto
Hey
Gigante
How's your day been?
- Uh, fine.
- Yeah. Good, good.
Enjoying the good weather?
Uh, I haven't... I just landed.
- Have you? From where?
- Uh, Ukraine.
Oh, really?
- Welcome to London.
- Thanks.
So civilized.
How's things over there?
- Uh, they're...
- I know, obviously...
Yeah. They're rough.
Hey.
Okay, maybe I should
quick jump in the shower.
So what time do you want to leave?
I've gained weight since you've been away.
- No, you didn't.
- Yeah, I have.
- It was too stressful.
- You have?
What, you've been drinking?
- Well, I've been eating.
- Someone's been drinking.
I have not been eating good.
Uh, I have been exercising, but...
That's funny.
Yes. I have to go on a diet.
You can go on the Ukraine diet
if you want.
- Yeah, you...
- It's called stress.
Well, you made it back.
Alive. That was a feat.
Oh, there he is.
Oh!
Ohh!
Come on.
Hey!
Hi, my love! Hi!
- Mwah! Hi.
- Hi.
Oh, boy. You've never hugged me like that.
The first one was, uh...
- That was a very good performance.
- Very good.
How can you remember all of that?
This morning, I left Ukraine,
drove to Poland,
flew to London, took a train from Gatwick,
and got here on time for your performance.
Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh.
Oh, my gosh.
Uh, you fall down, not up.
- Fall up! Fall up!
- Yeah.
Maybe, Lynsey, you can
read the night story first.
- Get it! Get it!
- You're back.
- Get it! Get it! Get it!
- Yeah.
- You only have five weeks to...
- I don't really...
Five weeks. You get no mercy.
I'm not really up for reading
a bedtime story.
No, no, you just do
a short one and then...
- Oh, Paul.
- Alfred. Alfred.
Do you want Mommy
to read you a night story?
Yeah.
This sucks so bad.
"She lived with her mean stepmother
and her two silly stepsisters.
Cinderella did everything
for her lazy family."
Oh, yeah, that's much better.
So when was the last time
Lukas had a bath?
Um...
- that's a good question. Um...
- Fuck!
- He did have a shower...
- I mean, seriously, Paul.
Yeah, I think he probably had something...
That was like five days ago.
That was on Sunday, Holi, wasn't it?
Alright.
So do you want to walk to school tomorrow?
- Yeah.
- Really?
Wow. You must really have missed me.
Is that Lukas or Alfred?
- Lukas.
- What time does he go to bed?
8:15.8:30.
What do you have to do
to put him to bed these days?
You've forgotten?
Yeah, I have forgotten.
Bed.
Okay, you don't know how we do it.
Then we watch a Modern Family.
- Now?
- Yes.
- Go get Daddy.
- Okay.
Not with your iPad.
I know.
Oh, my God, kids are
so much harder than war.
Oh, God.
Um...
I have all of the front pages here.
- Then that one.
- Yeah, I like that one.
That's the other one.
And then this is a very good one.
This one, obviously.
You know, the video of them
when they were getting mortared.
I mean, she didn't tell me about that.
And I saw it on,
on Twitter obviously first.
And she says to me, "Oh, shit.
Yeah, yeah, I didn't think
you'd see that."
So that was stressful.
But if you keep thinking
about those things,
it's going to drive you nuts.
So I don't.
I would have used the other photo.
I know...
I was a journalist
running the Reuters bureau.
So I think if we both
were going to do 24-hour news,
I mean, it's just difficult, right?
There's very few who are both journalists
and have a family.
And that's not even when you're going
to a danger zone.
It's just the news cycle.
It's kind of impossible.
Oh, my God, I'm so tired.
I didn't want her to change.
To be who she isn't.
Hi, Mom. Say hi to Paul.
Hi, Camille. How's it going?
Hi. Are you happy, boy?
I am. It's good to have her back.
Now, I don't have to get up
at 5:20 every morning.
I know!
It's the only reason he's happy.
When I first met him,
I remember thinking, like,
who is this arrogant guy, you know?
I thought she was really loud, American.
But we had become
really, really good friends.
They're totally,
totally different backgrounds.
Lynsey was brought up by hairdressers.
Paul comes from a kind of wealthy family.
His father is a count,
and he's a count or something,
I don't know.
Um, yeah. I mean, I grew up
very privileged, you know.
My father grew up all his life in France.
As a kid, he lived in a big
marble castle outside Monaco,
where we had a big private zoo.
Being in a relationship was something
I always sort of romanticized.
But the way I throw myself into my work,
it's all-consuming.
Most people can't deal with that.
I never expected I would find
someone like Paul.
You know, I was running
my teams and editing
and writing and doing breaking news.
I'd say, okay, I'm going, you know,
to Afghanistan for a month.
And he'd say, okay.
I knew I'd marry him.
She sent a mass email to a group of women
saying, "Guess what? I'm pregnant."
The next email was to me alone
to say, "And by the way,
I still want to do that story."
That's very much Lynsey.
You have a 10-week-old baby.
I do.
Are you going to keep doing this?
Do you ask men that question?
It's the question
I've gotten probably
300 times in the last 10 weeks.
I've only had a baby 10 weeks.
I started working three months
after giving birth,
but I sort of slipped in the roster
of who to call
when there were big stories.
Some editors gave me assignments,
stories that were a little softer
and less political.
But I'm a conflict photographer.
I do this work because
I want to have impact,
and I want to affect policy.
And to take that away
from me really became
like an identity crisis.
I started doubting everything
about myself and my career.
In 2018, I asked
the foreign picture editor
if I can cover Mosul, and he said,
"I'm not sending you Mosul.
You're a mother now."
I said, "Look,
if you have an issue with me",
"I will provide you tomorrow
with a list of ten women
you need to be hiring
for The New York Times."
He sits back, and he had a whiskey
in his hand, I'll never forget.
He sits back like this,
and he has a whiskey.
And he was like, um,
"I've worked for the
New York Times for seven years,
"and there just are no women
in the world good enough
for The New York Times."
There's very much a narrative today
that the profession
has been dominated by men.
But there have been women
photographing war
from the beginning of war photography.
The main challenge
is being underestimated.
The assumption is a female photographer
is somehow less equipped,
covering conflict
and covering high risk stories.
We want to really strive
for the visual authors
of our journalism to be as reflective
of the world that we're trying
to cover as possible...
which means that you need
the widest possible representation.
Cameras are in the hands
of more people than ever before.
That's shifting the kinds
of pictures we see,
the stories we're seeing.
So much happens in war
that is meant to never be seen.
In the Iraq War,
I remember just witnessing
all this brutality
I realized the fundamental
importance of journalism.
That was the moment
where I thought, this is everything to me.
I knew that I wouldn't do
anything else ever.
You know,
she's really good at what she does.
What that means, like,
really fundamentally, is
you go into, like,
these really terrible places
where most people wouldn't go
in a million years.
You kind of find your way in,
and you capture the human drama,
like in a second, and then you get out.
And she's really good at that.
You know, the proof of that
is, is in her pictures
and that she's still alive.
We were in Iraq for the worst of the war.
The Americans came and, like,
the country disintegrated
into anarchy.
And we were in the middle of that.
Allahu Akbar!
People didn't have electricity.
They couldn't get propane for cooking.
They couldn't get money out of the banks.
Chaos.
The protests...
kind of
the genesis of the insurgency.
I wanna do a raid story. Like a mystery.
We all lived in a house together.
The New York Times.
There were about five reporters
and a couple photographers.
I think we had 45 armed gunmen
protecting the place.
We had blast walls,
uh, belt-fed machine guns.
It was a fortress.
It was like a full-on fortress.
Eyewitnesses say gunmen opened fire,
killing at least four foreigners inside.
But the victims were wearing
civilian clothes
and bulletproof vests, commonly used
by foreign contractors, the media...
Before the invasion of Iraq,
there was still this kind
of unwritten rule
that, like, you don't kill
American reporters.
Completely different. Um, we were targets.
They were coming after us.
Lynsey and another reporter,
Jeffrey, got in a car.
They decided to go to Fallujah.
Terrible place. Very dangerous.
They got kidnapped.
They saw Jeffrey and they said,
we got an American.
They took him to their car.
You know, that's the end.
My first instinct is
they're gonna kill him.
And so I jumped out of the car
after Jeffrey and grabbed his arm
and said, "This man's my husband."
"He's my husband." Like this, you know.
Immediately, "Where are you from?
What are you doing here?"
And, of course, the last thing
you want to be in Iraq
at that point was an American.
So I took my two passports
and managed to slip them
in my underwear under my a bay a.
We're journalists.
I'm Italian. He's Greek.
She saved him.
They didn't know what to do.
And they finally said, okay, like,
get out of here.
And they let him go.
Um, that close.
Before that happened,
I thought I was invincible.
Journalists have definitely become targets
more and more.
Not only killed, but kidnapped,
beaten, threatened.
That is happening
increasingly around the world.
She is the twelfth Al Jazeera
journalist killed.
He was apparently
beheaded by ISIS militants.
Shelled by the Syrian military.
Go, go, go.
No helmet?
He's immortal.
Oh, fuck me. That's like...
Don't say that.
Jesus Christ, there's no wood.
Where are the Russian positions?
We drive just to Russian positions.
- Could be mines.
- Oh, Jesus Christ.
Be careful.
Tell me a little about your life
before you joined the military.
Oh, now I know that I have
a really great life before war.
I read a lot.
It was really simple
but really great life.
Yulia is one of the soldiers
I met on the second day of the war
who was a teacher.
The response to that photograph
of her was huge.
And, like, it encapsulated
so much of people who are just offering
themselves up despite how scared they are.
And so my idea is
to follow her for a year.
Did you imagine yourself, like,
getting married and having children?
And what do you think now
about your future?
No, it's really scared to have children
because I know
that I can do different things.
I don't be afraid about myself.
But if I have children,
it will be very difficult for me.
Are we in the quadrant of the city
- that gets hit all the time?
- Yeah.
And we're next to a military base.
- Yeah.
- Oh, fuck.
- Not very far away.
- No, no.
Fucking hell.
- It's close.
- Very close.
Should we not stay here?
- Yeah, probably.
- Let's go to the hospital.
Should we go to the hospital?
Some of the best stories are
in the most dangerous places.
I have to constantly weigh
what will I risk my life for?
And it's often civilians.
Those missiles you say
that have no shrapnel.
This is why bombs are lethal.
Because this flies
through you and you die.
We were in Zaporizhzhia
photographing the exodus out of Mariupol.
And it was while Mariupol
was still under siege.
There were families
who had lived underground
for six weeks.
Most people didn't make it out.
And the people who did,
they were just destroyed.
I heard a girl crying.
She and her mother escaped
the week before.
And they left her
18-year-old sister behind
because her 18-year-old sister
had a boyfriend
that she didn't want to leave.
The girl thought she would
never see her sister again.
And her sister pulled up a week later.
I do my hair toss check my nails
Baby, how you feeling?
Feeling good as hell!
Going to sleep thinking,
I hope a missile doesn't come
through my window at night.
Because we've been all been
sleeping in buildings where,
you know, that are next door to buildings
where the missile has come in
and simply by chance not been in them.
If it makes you happy
Hi, Lyns.
Hi, Mom.
How are you?
Good. You're frozen.
So I was supposed to leave today,
but there's a curfew.
Leave to come home? Oh, thank God.
Don't jinx it. I told Lisa that, she...
No, no, no, no, no, no,
I'm not jinxing it.
I'm just happy to see your face.
Because I don't turn on the TV. Yeah.
Yeah. Better you don't.
Uh, it's all fine.
There's nothing. It's fine.
We're totally safe here.
One of us would check in,
and we would just relay, like,
Lyns is fine, you know.
And then we would send it out
to the parents. To us.
That happened twice a day
the entire time she's in Ukraine.
Yeah, yeah.
So morning and evening check-ins.
I'm the youngest of four girls,
so I always looked up to my sisters
and wanted to be with them.
- She was a little...
- She was a whiner.
Kind of a pain in the ass, but fearless.
Like, from the day that she was born.
She didn't learn how to swim.
She just jumped in the pool
and started swimming.
The two middle ones
were attached to the hip,
and they always picked on her.
We would hang signs around her neck
when she was sleeping
that said, like, "I'm ugly."
Apparently, I opened up a can of soda
and poured it over her head.
But we often say that that's
what made her who she is today.
- Yeah.
- Because we toughened her up,
and we were relentless.
- She was at war.
- Yeah.
My parents were both
hairdressers in Connecticut.
There were a lot of creative people
that worked for us, and we had
a lot of creative friends.
They had parties constantly.
- Drag queens dressed up.
- It was very colorful.
Everybody was welcome. Always welcome.
Non-judgmental.
I think that's probably
more than anything.
I didn't grow up in a family
where we went to museums
or galleries on the weekend.
We were anything but intellectual.
You know, we didn't even have books
in our house growing up.
I remember our family being really happy.
And then when I was eight,
I remember my mom just,
like, piling us into the car
and driving to the parking lot and saying,
your dad is going to live
with a friend in New York
and he's not coming back.
And I thought, oh, he's going
to live with a roommate,
like he's going to live with a friend.
You know, I had no idea.
I did not connect the dots at all.
He was married,
so I assumed he wasn't gay.
But obviously I knew he was gay
when he approached me.
The transition from him
being our mom's best friend
to being our dad's boyfriend
was rougher on our mom, obviously.
For us, it didn't seem like a betrayal
because it was all very friendly,
but it was like the talk of the town.
And that part was really, really hard.
I really struggled with my dad.
We were always in touch.
I would go to his house.
But there was a lot of, like,
underlying resentment.
One of the clients gave my dad
a camera, and he gave it to me
when I was like 12 or 13.
I was obsessed, and I would
just stay in the dark room
until all hours of the night.
I wasn't really aware of photojournalism.
I studied international relations
and Italian at University of Wisconsin,
but when I graduated,
all I wanted to do was photograph.
I realized that you can
tell stories with pictures.
And then my camera became
this sort of excuse
for walking in and out of,
like, any situation,
I could just sort of say,
"I want to take pictures.
Can I come in?"
So I was traveling
and kind of meeting people
because I had a camera.
Mom!
- Mom!
- Alfred.
You want more bread, Alfie?
Cheese!
Alfred, are you going to be
a photographer like Mummy?
Yeah!
He's not allowed
to be a photographer!
Fears of renewed
strikes by Russian forces.
More than five
and a half thousand civilians
are thought to have been killed
in the fighting.
Lukas?
Yeah. I'm just...
I'm putting this away.
- What is that?
- Nothing.
What is this?
- What is it?
- It's a plate.
From my vest.
Lukas is definitely becoming more aware,
but he has a lot of, like,
protective mechanisms
where he just either shuts down
or he pretends like it doesn't matter.
He kind of just doesn't talk
about anything.
When the left
balance of the universe...
The teacher said
Alfred cried when another mom...
the kids said he's
seeing Mom after school.
- And Alfred...
- Oh, great, why don't you just
make me feel a little worse?
Why don't you?
- Holy crap.
- He was crying,
- and Sarah had to cuddle him.
- Oh, God.
It was a bit sensitive.
When I'm not shooting,
I'm so stretched thin.
I'm trying to close stories,
edit, caption.
All of this is very much on deadline.
Since the war,
she's been gone quite a lot, you know.
One month in Ukraine,
then maybe back two weeks, then maybe
speaking engagement or an exhibition
and then back a little bit.
- Your name is Mommy?
- Yeah, my name is Mommy.
Then Ukraine
and then something else.
If you want to stay relevant,
you got to be available all the time.
She's worried about it. Gets older.
You know, if she doesn't do these things,
even if she's an amazing photographer,
you know, they won't assign her.
One of us has to be
a constant in the kids' lives.
Paul left Reuters.
He started doing consulting.
That enabled us to have a family.
- Nice?
- Yeah.
- You like it?
- He's the one the school calls.
He's the one who goes
to all the PTA meetings.
He's the one who takes them
to school in the morning.
I've set it up so that if something
does happen to me, they have Paul.
So are you training every day now?
Yes.
And are you still scared?
Um. You know, I'm, uh...
All these weeks, I couldn't cry.
I don't know why,
because I saw terrible videos,
photos with, uh, that people, children...
Uh, but now I'm just angry,
and I'm not afraid now.
I know I'm gonna regret
not going to the forest position
- if I don't go.
- You are?
Yeah, of course I am.
I always regret everything.
You will regret going
if you lose your legs,
so, I mean...
I know.
Does anyone
actually man this weapon
or do they just keep it here?
We are waiting, ma'am, for the...
Oh, we're wait...
They're putting their makeup on.
Oh, my God.
The nose.
You definitely know you're
too far from the front line
if the soldiers have to go put
their flak jackets on for the media.
I-I can't deal with this.
Should we just go somewhere else?
I'll take a picture so they're happy
because they put on
clothes for the camera.
They probably bring journalists
here every day.
I'm in such a bad mood,
and this light is so bad.
I don't want to be on the front.
I need to be on the front.
It's too dangerous at the front.
Why are we at the front?
Welcome to the inner workings of my brain.
A war zone doesn't mean
there's, like, active combat
in every single part of the country.
In Ukraine, there are certain places
that get hit more than others.
But, like, in Kyiv, life goes on.
Ukraine has always been
one of the top places
for surrogacy around the world.
When the war started,
those families couldn't come
and pick up their babies.
And there were so many women
who were pregnant
with other people's babies.
- Without face.
- Without face. Okay.
And the kids are okay.
Okay. She doesn't know anyone
in the US at least.
Yeah, but it... just...
In case they're on the internet or...
These women
who give birth for other women
are sort of like these angels.
You know, they come in,
and they bring life
in situations where not everyone can.
We had a surrogate for Alfred...
and so, of course, I felt that connection.
I had a big car accident in 2009,
- Deep breath.
- Where I was thrown
out of a car on a highway in Pakistan.
My back got progressively
worse over the years,
and after I gave birth to Lukas,
everything kind of fell apart.
When we were thinking
about having another child,
for me, it just didn't even
seem like a possibility.
- You okay?
- Yeah.
I spend most of my free time
just getting strong again
to go on assignment.
- Oh, shit.
- I did it!
Only 20 kilos.
Exercise is a major part of my life.
It's how I ground myself.
It's where I give myself
the space to process things.
It's the only way I'm going
to be able to stay
in this profession
longer than a few years.
This is my life, you know.
She is on a mission, always,
singly focused and singly driven
about what she needs to do in the world.
She will do that at all costs.
When each of us got married,
our dads gave us $10,000
for our wedding gift.
Lyns went to Dad and Bruce
and said, "I'm never getting married,
so I want the ten grand
to buy camera equipment."
In the late '90s, I worked for the AP.
But my interest has always been abroad,
so I moved to India in 2000.
I started becoming aware
of women's issues...
and the fact that
most women around the world
don't have any basic rights.
Going to Afghanistan under the Taliban.
Girls are only allowed to stay in school
until they're about 12.
Women were not able to leave the house
without their husband's permission
or work outside of the home.
Many had been abused or been forced
into arranged marriages.
When I first started working
in Afghanistan,
I couldn't give away
those pictures for free.
And then September 11th happened.
Just when all the news organizations
were trying to figure out
all those different stories
related to the aftermath
of what had happened, she had the idea.
She said she wanted to tell the story
of the women of the jihad.
Showing a true picture
of this community
that very few people knew
what really happened behind closed doors.
The kind of work she does,
a lot of people choose
to go to black and white,
which allows you to do something
a little bit more metaphorical or poetic.
Not her.
Partly what defines
a great photojournalist
is the eye and the ability
to make memorable images,
but also to be able to go out
and find the story,
get access to the story.
In western Afghanistan,
it was very common for a woman
who wanted to commit suicide,
she would douse herself
in gasoline or some sort of oil
and set herself on fire, often not dying.
I spent, like, a week in a hospital,
in a burn unit,
watching, like, woman after woman,
sometimes girls, come in,
like, charred to a crisp,
and you smell them before you see them.
All of them had been abused.
And I realized, like, that's why
women are setting themselves on fire.
Because anything is better
than their lives.
And I remember getting,
like, so overwhelmed.
I can't do this. Like, I can't
internalize, like,
this pain and this, like, abuse.
I was overwhelmed
with this sense of injustice.
I realized that I can really
get into the lives of women
with my camera and with reporting.
With who?
Hmm?
Hmm.
Lynsey has a very distinct ability
to go places men are not welcome, right?
So she can cover huge parts
of the story that they can't.
She wants to make pictures that are stark
and show the reality as close as she can,
hoping that it will have an effect.
When I met Mamma Sessay,
she had delivered
the first twin in the village,
and the second baby wouldn't come out.
She had to take a canoe to the ambulance,
in the ambulance on bumpy roads
for about six hours
to get to the hospital.
Oh, my God!
She finally delivered the second baby.
What is this?
What's all the blood from, the placenta?
At that point, I didn't know
anything about childbirth.
- 60/40?
- Yeah.
She's becoming
more and more out of it.
So I stopped photographing,
and I said to the midwives,
"Where is the doctor?"
Well, there's one doctor
in the whole province,
and he's probably in surgery.
So I ran to the surgical ward, and I said,
"I think there's a woman dying."
And at this point, I'm obviously involved,
which I, you know,
I probably shouldn't be,
but I'm watching a woman dying.
The doctor came out,
took her blood pressure.
And she was dead.
At that time, over 500,000 women a year
were dying in childbirth,
and a majority of those cases
were completely preventable.
I wanted it to be published
so that perhaps it could bring
some sort of change.
Hi, Alfred.
You should still be asleep.
It's only 6:30. Come, come.
Come, come.
No, no, no, no. It's 6:30, Alfred.
Come on, come on.
I'll take you to your room.
I'm hungry.
Yeah, but in a minute. Come on.
Alfred.
Where's my... Where's my Mummy?
Mummy is working, Alfred.
Is she downstairs?
She's in another country,
but she's going to come back soon.
There you go.
But you have to say cheers.
- Cheers.
- Cheers.
British Airways.
Flight eight...
It's the length of assignments.
That's always been the challenge
in our relationship.
If it's one week, two weeks,
it's not really a big deal.
But when it gets longer,
over three weeks is always...
Things tend to unravel at home.
Careful, Alfred. Ah-ah!
Okay! Okay!
Snap! Snap!
In my heart, all I want
to be doing is shooting.
It's frustrating. I'm constantly tortured.
Like, I'm not in the right place.
But I come back.
I'm supposed to be really happy,
and I feel like I should be there,
and I feel like a bad journalist
because I'm not.
My head is always where I'm not.
Hi, Lukas.
When are you coming back?
Oh, like ten days.
- Oh.
- I know, my love.
It's the compromise, right?
She wants to do all of the things
and be at home as well.
And it's just not possible.
Everything has gotten delayed.
I may not get home till Saturday.
I suck as a parent.
I suck as a journalist.
I'm always compromising.
I can't do it. I'll switch with someone.
No, no, no, no.
This is what you gotta do.
He's asked for it constantly.
This is Alfred's thing.
I mean, are you seriously not gonna...
Why don't you just be a mother?
Daddy, Daddy, I love you.
With Alfred, all of a sudden,
there was mega regression.
Wetting the bed and stuff.
A fresh round of missiles
pummeled Ukraine this weekend.
Hardest hit this residential...
With Lukas, there will be moments
when he sees Ukraine missiles stuff on TV.
I don't really know
what you do to, to prevent
the kind of anxiety
being created, you know.
pitch darkness,
rescue workers raced overnight.
God.
Here we can shoot, right?
Let's go. Yeah.
The Russians entered this town?
Oh, my God.
We picked the wrong fucking day.
When you're working in a war zone,
you really are timing
things down to the minute.
Lynsey is conscious
of those limits,
but she wants to take it
right up to that edge,
to where we're both feeling
pretty uncomfortable
about being in a place.
Lynsey will just continue
to press and press and press
until she gets what she needs.
Oh, Jesus.
Fuck. Fuck. I hate this.
People always ask me, and I know
they ask Lynsey the same thing,
are you addicted to the adrenaline?
You know, are you, like, a war junkie?
Very few people
have been able to do that
for any sustained period of time
without destroying their lives.
All you have to do is, like,
look at the scorecard.
Divorced. Divorced. Divorced.
Having an affair. Drinks too much.
In a massive show of force
not seen since the Cold War...
I think what you are addicted to
is the largeness of it.
Possibly the biggest land war
that Europe has seen
since the Second World War.
These countries, they change so fast.
Ukrainian troops
recaptured Kherson this month.
It's like history on fast forward.
Everything's accelerated.
It's an amazing thing
to be in the middle of.
You're breathing pure oxygen
the whole time.
I'm most present
when I'm working.
I feel like I'm home.
I feel most inspired and exhilarated
when I'm covering something
that I know will contribute
to the historical picture
of what happened.
The fall of the Taliban.
The Iraq War.
The Korangal Valley in Afghanistan.
When we asked to go
to the Korangal Valley,
it was the place where the United States
was dropping the most bombs
in the country.
The Pentagon would not allow
women soldiers on the front line.
But there was not the same
mandate for journalists.
Every single day,
the platoons had to go out and patrol.
Instead of carrying weapons,
Lynsey would have, like,
cameras and lenses
strapped to her all over the place.
Almost like clockwork on their way back,
they would get shot at.
If they weren't physically fit enough,
they would put us in danger.
But those two women are...
they're hard as woodpecker lips.
They earned our trust very quickly.
We spent more or less
two months with these guys
and had various conversations,
talked about their lives,
what they wanted to do when they got out.
Rock Avalanche
was the most arduous operation
they were both a part of.
The idea was
to jump out of helicopters
in the middle of the night into the heart
of Taliban territory,
assuming the Taliban would fire at us
so that the US military could fire back,
and it would basically
show their position.
We could get one
going from west to east
into that, over.
Over.
We had Tim He the ring ton.
He was with one platoon.
We had Lynsey and Elizabeth,
were located with me.
And we know something's about to happen.
We just don't know
when it's going to happen.
We don't know where
it's going to come from.
Trees blocked you from ever
being able to see the enemy.
So it was like you were fighting ghosts.
Throughout the whole time,
Lynsey, I don't want to say she's begging,
but she's being very persistent.
She wants to be where the fight
is going to potentially be.
And almost as soon
as Lynsey got down there,
the valley erupted.
It was so chaotic in the moment.
There were bullets everywhere.
We were ambushed from three sides.
There were three people down.
And then I see them coming out
holding the body bag.
I started crying,
and I stopped and I said, "Is it okay?
Like, can I, can I take a picture?"
And he said, "Yeah."
There's a lot that we ask our soldiers
at a young, young age.
You probably question the same stuff
that I did every single night,
"What am I doing here?"
Our nation needs to understand
what the cost of war is.
What Lynsey and everybody
in that profession does,
I think it's critical.
It's-it's more than just a profession.
It's almost a duty or a calling.
War is always so distant
because of the ban on photographing
caskets coming back to America.
The price that so many thousands
of families have paid
that no one ever documents,
either because we're censored
or we're not there
or we can't get permission to publish.
I do not agree that we should censor war.
When we make a decision
to invade a country,
people have to understand
the consequences.
All of this coverage provides
the international community with proof
of how Russians dealt with people
and treated people and killed people.
How are you feeling now?
Did you think you would still be here?
Um...
The first days, I hope, uh,
that war will finish
maybe in a few months.
And now I understand that...
it can be years and years.
The first two weeks or ten days,
I didn't know who I am.
It was terrible for me because
I know that I am a teacher,
I'm Yulia, I'm a friend, I'm a daughter.
Such a big face.
Me too. When I was that age,
I had a big face.
Aww.
Now I know who I am.
I have new friends. I have new family.
The amount of difficult stories
that I've done,
it's, it's a lot.
And so I wonder where all that lives
in my head and my heart.
You know, it's like I know it's there,
and I know I speak about it
very sort of methodically,
but it's hard to look at.
It's a strange way to...
It's a strange way to live
because... Lynsey, for instance,
like she's seeing,
she's seeing a lot of pain,
often every day.
So you basically condition yourself
to, like, put that in a box,
you know, turn the key.
Maybe Lukas should have this for dinner.
No.
Mommy's gonna love that dinner, Alfred.
It's making me look good. Now!
Are you looking forward to seeing her?
- Yep.
- Hmm? How much?
- More.
- More than what?
Anything.
She's a worker...
a photographer and a worker.
Oh. Who's that?
Mama.
Did you know?
- Did you know I was coming?
- Yeah.
Oh, my love!
Mama!
Mama! Mama! Mama!
Are you excited, Alfred?
You see how quickly
he became a superhero.
It's quite innovative.
Has he been like this since I left or...
What you mean? Well, he's excited.
No. Oh!
Careful with my eyeballs.
What would Mommy be without my eyeballs?
You'd be nothing.
Exactly.
Lukas?
Hi, Dad.
Hi, Mom.
Hi!
Hi, my love. Hi.
Oh, I missed you so much.
- Mama.
- Hi.
It's the best day ever.
I wish always to have you.
- To have me?
- Mm.
- Home.
- Never to go away.
I know, but Mommy has to work.
You... You never have to go
to work ever again.
Really?
- I have to, my love.
- It's your last time.
- Ever going to work?
- Yeah.
How about one day, and that's it?
I mean, one day is a little difficult.
- But...
- Well, how about three days,
That's it. Three. One...
One, two, three. And that's it.
- You go back.
- And I come back?
Yeah.
I mean, it depends on where I go.
Some places that I go,
it's like really far away.
So if I go for...
You know, sometimes
it takes three days for me
to even get where I go, you know?
Does that make sense?
How about you go
to the closest place ever?
You mean you want me to work in London?
- No.
- Hmm, I can't do that.
You.
I mean, he needs, like,
a Valium is what he needs.
I mean, I don't know
how anyone can deal with him 24/7.
He's really, like... He's so energetic.
I think he needs,
you know, a bit of a change.
He needs to be in a calm environment.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We did talk in depth about
the importance of, you know,
covering Ukraine, and I did agree to it
and said I thought it was a good idea
that she does it.
I didn't think it would be
going on for this long,
I'm gonna put it that way.
The main issue that we have
to be very careful about
is that we just start leading
totally separate lives.
Paul, I-I just... I've been...
That happened before.
He shut down,
and we went through a really tough time,
and we started going to couples therapy
and, like, we did a lot of work.
"Phoebe, I love you,
"but my work is my life,
and that's what I have to do right now."
And I say, "Your work, your work?
How can you say that?"
And then you say, um,
"It's tearing me apart."
That sounds like conversations we've had.
Lukas, what do you have
tomorrow after school?
Do you want Black Cat again
for the dinner party on Saturday?
Why... What's going on?
Why are you having a spasm?
How are you so ticklish?
Alfred talks, you know,
all the time when you're coming.
Oh.
Hi, my little muffin.
He understands time now,
and he's very attached to you,
weirdly enough.
Did you turn 10 while I was gone?
How old are you now?
Not yet.
Are you? Do you tell everyone you're five?
You're almost five.
There's only so much I can control,
- you know.
- Yeah, I know.
But I'm not planning on doing another,
like, four-to six-week rotation.
No, not right now.
Right after we got married,
he was like, "Okay, let's start a family."
And I was like, "No way."
She wouldn't have done it
without my kind of pushing.
I've always pictured myself with a family
because I grew up
with such a loving family.
But, um, like, not today, you know,
I was kind of at the height of my career.
I didn't know any female photographers
who had kids.
I couldn't envision
how my life would look.
Paul was, like, very serious.
You know, we were having this dinner,
and he was just like,
"You know, I want a family."
I didn't fully understand
how hard it is,
particularly in her type of work.
It's easy for the guy to have a kid,
you're running a bureau,
you don't have to go anywhere,
there's no problem really, right?
And I think I viewed it
a bit like that too, at the time.
Hey, come on.
I said we should
be married at least a year.
So I negotiated basically
that January 1st, 2011,
I would go off the pill.
So I did, but then
I never went home.
I went to South Sudan...
to Iraq.
And then the Arab Spring started.
Massive protests
over government corruption,
political repression.
Similar demonstrations have popped up
in Yemen and Algeria.
It's now spreading
all across the region,
particularly to Libya,
where Muammar Gaddafi runs one of the most
repressive regimes in the entire region.
I had covered the Middle East
and North Africa for years,
and I said, I want to go to Libya.
It was the end of February 2011.
I was based in Benghazi
and covering this sort
of parallel government
being set up by the youth
in eastern Libya.
We kind of pushed forward
with the first group of volunteers.
Gaddafi's military had
exponentially more weapons,
technology, trained fighters.
I hear a plane.
There was nowhere to hide.
The landscape was totally flat
and a bomb would just drop next to us.
Every day. It was terrifying.
I had been two weeks on the front line.
Every single day. Completely pummeled.
I called my editor and said,
"I need to get out of here."
And he said, "Okay."
And the team at that point
was Anthony Shadid,
Steve Farrell, Tyler Hicks.
Tyler Hicks is, to the rest of the world,
one of the most famous,
intrepid war photographers.
Tyler Hicks, to me,
is someone I grew up with.
I've known him since I was 13 years old.
I freelanced, but Tyler is staff,
and he's like the primary
New York Times photographer.
And the editor told him,
"I think you should stay."
So I was like,
"Okay, I'll stay with Tyler."
Like, I'm not gonna leave Tyler alone.
For whatever reason that day,
I had this horrible premonition.
Things were getting
really tense on the front line.
And all these artillery rounds
were coming in,
literally being bracketed
on the position we were at.
Muhammad, our driver,
started getting calls from his brother.
"Gaddafi's troops are in the city.
You have to get out."
And Gaddafi repeatedly told his military,
if you see journalists, they're spies,
and you should just execute them.
They are spreading lies
on radios and televisions.
We're all journalists
who entered illegally.
I am freaking out.
But I don't want to say anything
because I'm the only woman.
And Mohammed starts screaming,
like, "We have to get out of here."
And as we get on the main road,
way off in the distance,
I see these little figurines of soldiers.
And I said, "You guys,
that's Gaddafi's troops ahead."
We get to the checkpoint.
Gaddafi's troops, like pointing
their guns, screaming,
"Get out! Stop the car! Stop the car!"
Mohammed stops the car,
opens the door, and just, like,
throws his arms up and says,
"Sahafen." Journalists.
There are Gaddafi's troops everywhere.
I was staring down the barrel of the gun
and I looked to the right,
and I see Tyler,
Anthony, and Steve all begging.
And our young driver, Muhammad,
he was executed.
I was running the Reuters operation
in India, in Delhi.
I got a call from...
I guess in the evening...
from Tyler's girlfriend Nikki, saying,
have you heard from, uh,
from Lynsey or Tyler? And I said no.
That was...
I... I was home,
but I was on my way to my mother's,
and I checked my voicemail.
The CEO of The New York Times
left a message for me to call him.
So I called and he says,
um, "Mrs. Addario.
We have, um, sad news."
So I dropped the phone.
I had my receptionist talk to them
at The New York Times
because I, I just couldn't...
talk to them and then come back...
The woman said to me,
"Oh, please stop. It's okay. Just go home.
I don't care when you cut my hair."
I says, "I have to do this."
My toes, I think on my right foot
where I put my pressure,
are permanently curled
because all I kept doing
was digging my foot in the ground.
No word from
four New York Times journalists.
Lynsey Addario is among the missing.
I'll talk to her husband in
an exclusive interview. Up next.
I appeal to-to Muammar Gaddafi
and his son and the others to find them
and to bring them back safely
and to bring my Lynsey,
you know, back here.
It hadn't been the first kidnapping.
And quite a few other people had died.
I mean, I was sleepless.
I'm going to say, you know,
you got to come back here
because, you know, we got to have kids.
You know, that-that's my, uh...
I've been trying to, you know, to get...
- The day Paul went on...
- I was just gonna...
I totally hadn't even cried
until that point.
He came on and I saw Paul's face,
and I heard him say that,
and I just burst into tears.
Not knowing whether she was dead,
alive, or sexually abused...
that was probably
the worst time of my whole life.
The first three days,
they were super violent.
We were all blindfolded and bound.
They were really, like, beating the shit
out of Tyler, Anthony, and Steve.
There was a guy who was just,
like, caressing my face
and saying something over and over,
and I said, "Anthony, what is he saying?"
And he said,
"You're going to die tonight."
We drove for hours all along the front line
through these very hostile
villages loyal to Gaddafi.
Every time we would slow down
at a checkpoint,
crowds would come and try and pull us
out of the truck and beat us up.
There was a soldier next to me,
and he was touching me everywhere.
My first thought was,
I just don't want to be raped.
Editors at The New York Times
say they were last in touch
with their journalists on Tuesday Morning.
We didn't know if they were alive
or if they were dead.
I'd stay up 24/7
speaking to contacts,
to the Turkish President
and Prime Minister...
first to find out if they were alive
and then to try to get them out.
They brought us to this room
and sat us down on the rug.
They took off our blindfolds
and we're all, like,
looking at one another.
And he was like, "Okay, you're safe now.
We're not going to beat you anymore."
And everyone was just, like, crying.
Like basically everyone
was just, like, destroyed.
One of the Libyan officials
handed me his cell phone,
and I was like...
And I put it to my ear, and it was Paul.
He basically just said, uh,
"You're getting released,"
"and I'll meet you in Tunisia."
All four New York Times journalists
who were captured and held
for six days were released.
She was a basket case.
I think we all were.
She cried a lot,
and it was very emotional.
You have faced, uh, the-the fear
of-of losing your life
in the line of reporting duty.
You were sexually assaulted?
I was groped. Um, I was groped repeatedly.
- How often?
- Pretty much every time we...
every time we changed hands to new men.
So she's very open what happened,
and, and I think that helped a lot.
We talked about the things that you think,
the influence you feel you have
by taking these
remarkably moving photographs
and letting the world know
about the perils,
particularly of women,
but of people who are in danger.
Is it worth it?
It's a hard question.
I mean, I certainly in the middle of this
with my... when I was
blindfolded and bound
and getting punched in the face,
I said, "Why do I do this?
Who cares about Libya?
Why do I care about Libya?"
You know, these are questions
I asked myself repeatedly.
I do it because I believe in it.
But is it worth my life?
Is it worth doing this
to the people I love?
It's a difficult question.
It took a while.
I think that there are
very few people on the planet
who can understand how we live our lives,
and why we do what we do.
We're following the latest
on a story of two journalists
who gave their lives to cover the story.
They were killed yesterday
covering the war in Libya.
Chris Hondros and
Tim He the ring ton were hit by...
Tim He the ring ton
I was with in the Korangal.
And Chris Hondros is someone
I've known forever.
Tim and Chris' death sent me over the edge
in a way that our own kidnapping didn't.
I couldn't understand why we survived
and they didn't.
"I was just like, " Fuck this.
Enough. Enough death."
I had to pull back and get my bearings,
figure out emotionally
how much I could cope with
and not only me, how much
my family could cope with.
One day, I got a phone call.
He said, I am a board member
at Merck, the pharmaceutical company.
I would like to tell you
a story about Mamma Sessay.
He said when that story came out,
I put a copy of the story
in front of every board member,
and they unanimously decided
to put $500 million aside
to fight maternal death.
Doctors Without Borders
also had seen the story,
and they implemented an ambulance program
in Bo Province.
In that province alone,
they reduced
the maternal death rate by 60%.
For me, it was like one of those moments.
I see a lot of women die.
I see a lot of people die.
And somehow, it felt like
something came out of it,
and maybe it could help people.
You never get used to having
a sister who's a war photographer, right?
- Mm-hmm.
- You can't really overthink it,
because then you'll never
be able to function.
- Almost like, what's the point?
- You can't. Right.
Is that for the meat or the chicken?
Yeah. Cheers!
Cheers!
She knows that I worry about her.
I asked her, "You're not
going back, are you?"
"Yes. Maybe in August."
So we... The conversation
ended there because...
what are you going to do?
Tell her you can't go.
Even though we ain't got money
- Oh, another... Loggins.
- I'm so in love
With you, honey
Everything will bring
A chain of love
In the morning when I rise
Bring a tear of joy to my eyes
Are you crying?
The PTSD is kicking in.
- This is what happens.
- Oh, Lyns!
- Lyns.
- Every once in a while
when you least expect it, she breaks down.
God, we're singing like Kenny Loggins.
Ah.
Well, that put a damper on that one.
I know.
- How was school?
- Good.
- Yeah?
- Yeah.
Are we gonna get
a call from Mr. Bullard?
- No.
- Pollard.
Isn't it Payson Bullard?
- Yeah.
- Yeah. See?
I know something.
One of the few things
about school you know.
Lukas, stick up for me.
At least you now know
where, where the school is.
Oh.
I know where the school is.
I've always known where the school is.
I don't know where their classrooms are,
but I know where the school is.
I mean, when Mommy's at work,
you're kind of watching Netflix.
Yeah. Thanks, Lukas.
I mean, I'm working hard.
She's on the phone a lot.
Lukas, how come
you don't pick up when I call?
The only time you wrote me
when I was in Ukraine
was just to ask me
to put money in your account.
And then I ask you how you are.
Do you miss me?
I love you. You don't answer.
Lukas has said I don't want you to go.
And do you have to go back to Ukraine.
If Lukas, who barely
expresses anything, asks that,
it's definitely weighing on him.
People think, how can you still
go to war as a mother?
There is something way bigger
than any of us.
And I think it sort of takes over.
Something that starts as like
a try this, you dabble in it,
and then it becomes like a mission,
and then it becomes your life.
And then it becomes a responsibility.
869 dead in eight years of war.
A battleground
for more than 20 years.
Tens of thousands
of refugees have fled the...
More than
10,000 people in Yemen have died.
Two million
others have been displaced.
Millions near starvation.
All victims of a war the world's ignored.
People have a tendency to move on.
It's my job to get people
to continue paying attention.
I have dedicated most
of my career to Afghanistan.
And there I was back in the country
when the Taliban had come back,
and again, it had fallen off the radar.
All of the things that I had covered.
What's her name? Salam.
The programs and the funding
and the schooling,
it was taken away overnight.
Nine days
after the brutal terrorist attack
by Hamas, Israel ramps up
for a ground war in Gaza.
The humanitarian crisis continues
to get even worse because
there's 1.1 million people...
I've covered war
for 20 plus years,
and I can't believe
what we're watching right now.
Foreign press
almost completely blocked
from entering Gaza.
Sometimes I feel really helpless.
I just keep shooting
and keep moving forward.
I have to keep convincing myself
that it's worth it
and that it makes a difference
because I would not be able
to keep doing this work
if I didn't believe in it.
And if I didn't believe
that it was worth the toll
that it takes on my loved ones.
It's pretty busted up here.
- Wait.
- It is a photo shoot. Look.
Stop! Stop!
That's amazing.
Watch your step.
How about behind that wall?
Get down.
It's locked?
Uh, this is Lynsey Addario
in the village of Novoluhanske.
We're being shelled.
Why is a woman just standing there?
They're outgoing now or incoming?
That was incoming.
- It's incoming.
- Yeah.
Okay?
Oh, my God, are they crazy?
She's not worried about her child?
Come, come, come,
come, come, come, come!
Where is the front line?
- Where I am?
- That direction.
Well, this probably isn't
the best place, is it?
Thank you.
She doesn't want
to stay down here?
Can I take her photo?
What's her name?
We wake up this morning
to a war in Europe.
The first targets hit with cruise
and ballistic missiles
in and around Kyiv, the capital.
Oh, Jesus.
It's a boy and still don't have name.
The building next to my house.
In the first time in my life,
I do not know what to do.
That's crazy.
And you're a teacher?
Are you scared?
Of course.
Of course.
Lynsey, where are you right now?
I'm in Kyiv.
Things are getting very tense.
You're in the center
of the city, and it's a target.
Why are you staying there?
Because, uh, you know,
it's sort of, when you do this,
I think we've learned
that you want to be where,
like, sort of power in numbers.
All the journalists together.
That's what we've... There's...
It's not like there's anywhere
particularly that's safe.
We've seen instances
all over the country
where the Ukrainians have
really pushed back...
When the New York Times asked
if there is a war in Ukraine,
would you like to cover it?
I jumped on the opportunity.
I didn't have to think
very long because I knew
it would be a really historic moment.
And there's just, like,
a whole underground operation,
literally in the bunker.
What did he say?
Okay, let's go quick.
I started working with Andriy Dubchak
before the war started.
In Ukraine,
he's a very well-known photographer
and videographer.
And what is the name of this weapon?
He's basically my partner.
Okay, let me see.
So we have some dried foods.
The cookies. Because every time
we go to the grocery store,
I buy cookies.
A sleeping mat in case
you guys end up in the bunker.
We have water in the tub
in case they cut the water.
We can flush the toilet.
Or we could take a bath with that.
Any good news? Bad news?
There's smoke. A lot of smoke.
- Look.
- A lot of smoke, yeah.
So we can't see it.
So can you situate me for a second?
Yeah. So basically... Yeah.
So, obviously, that's
the front line over there.
You can hear the small arms fire,
and it sounds like
anti-tank weapons going off.
So that may be the start of the assault.
- Yeah.
- I suggest we start moving.
- Okay.
- Let's go.
Come on.
They let the man go right in front.
They don't like to see women here.
I always get kicked away.
You can go where you want.
It's like the story of my life.
- Just here, less exposure.
- Yeah.
They're fucking aiming
at the civilians?
Yep.
Shit.
Where'd that land?
Fuck, right by the people.
Shit!
Shit, shit, shit, shit.
Shit! Am I bleeding?
Am I bleeding?
- No, no.
- Alright.
- Stay there!
- Alright.
Come on! Medic!
Medic!
Oh, fuck, it's a person.
Be careful.
They're really sensitive. Move!
- Oh!
- Come on...
- You stay.
- Oh, fuck!
Fucking killing civilians.
I fucking hate these bastards.
Lynsey, go, go.
Get down.
The chances of further escalation
and bloodshed keep growing.
I messaged my editor
lobbying to publish the picture
because I witnessed
this civilian evacuation route
be targeted intentionally.
That's a war crime.
But none of us knew who
the people were in the photos.
What if there's a family member
that finds out because of your photograph?
President Putin speaking today...
They had to make the decision
whether to go with that risk or not.
In terms of the military tactics,
they're doing everything they can
to avoid loss of civilian life
in Ukrainian cities.
I made the case
that this is exactly
when Putin was saying that
he was not targeting civilians.
And I said I was in this attack.
It was intentional.
- Stay there!
- Alright.
That photograph did end up opening
the eyes of many people in the world
as to the consequences of Putin
going in to a sovereign country
and firing on a civilian population.
Vladimir Putin has repeatedly denied
his forces are targeting civilians.
But on Sunday, the world saw
the truth for itself.
This image
was published on the front page
of The New York Times today.
It is the unsanitized view of war.
In Ukraine, one picture
has starkly illustrated
the cost of the conflict.
The photo was taken
by Pulitzer Prize-winning
photojournalist Lynsey Addario.
And it's become one of
the defining images of this war.
It was even used as an exhibit
in a speech on the Senate floor
by Dick Durbin.
I've covered so many wars,
but it was probably the first time
that there was such a visceral,
widespread reaction
to one of my photographs.
Mm-hmm.
Oh, I remember
she was wearing this.
Oh, Jesus.
Mm-hmm.
We will stop
on the petrol station, okay?
- Yep.
- You drink coffee maybe
- if you like.
- Okay.
We are going to Balice,
to the airport, right?
- Or to the hotel?
- To Krakow. Airport.
I'm trying to go to
my son's music concert tonight.
Oh, super.
Gigante
Hey
Let me take you to the zoo
Zoo, zoo, zoo zoo, zoo, zoo
Zoo, zoo, zoo zoo, zoo, zoo
I like the way you do it me gusta
Stop! No seas tan adusto
Hey
Gigante
How's your day been?
- Uh, fine.
- Yeah. Good, good.
Enjoying the good weather?
Uh, I haven't... I just landed.
- Have you? From where?
- Uh, Ukraine.
Oh, really?
- Welcome to London.
- Thanks.
So civilized.
How's things over there?
- Uh, they're...
- I know, obviously...
Yeah. They're rough.
Hey.
Okay, maybe I should
quick jump in the shower.
So what time do you want to leave?
I've gained weight since you've been away.
- No, you didn't.
- Yeah, I have.
- It was too stressful.
- You have?
What, you've been drinking?
- Well, I've been eating.
- Someone's been drinking.
I have not been eating good.
Uh, I have been exercising, but...
That's funny.
Yes. I have to go on a diet.
You can go on the Ukraine diet
if you want.
- Yeah, you...
- It's called stress.
Well, you made it back.
Alive. That was a feat.
Oh, there he is.
Oh!
Ohh!
Come on.
Hey!
Hi, my love! Hi!
- Mwah! Hi.
- Hi.
Oh, boy. You've never hugged me like that.
The first one was, uh...
- That was a very good performance.
- Very good.
How can you remember all of that?
This morning, I left Ukraine,
drove to Poland,
flew to London, took a train from Gatwick,
and got here on time for your performance.
Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh.
Oh, my gosh.
Uh, you fall down, not up.
- Fall up! Fall up!
- Yeah.
Maybe, Lynsey, you can
read the night story first.
- Get it! Get it!
- You're back.
- Get it! Get it! Get it!
- Yeah.
- You only have five weeks to...
- I don't really...
Five weeks. You get no mercy.
I'm not really up for reading
a bedtime story.
No, no, you just do
a short one and then...
- Oh, Paul.
- Alfred. Alfred.
Do you want Mommy
to read you a night story?
Yeah.
This sucks so bad.
"She lived with her mean stepmother
and her two silly stepsisters.
Cinderella did everything
for her lazy family."
Oh, yeah, that's much better.
So when was the last time
Lukas had a bath?
Um...
- that's a good question. Um...
- Fuck!
- He did have a shower...
- I mean, seriously, Paul.
Yeah, I think he probably had something...
That was like five days ago.
That was on Sunday, Holi, wasn't it?
Alright.
So do you want to walk to school tomorrow?
- Yeah.
- Really?
Wow. You must really have missed me.
Is that Lukas or Alfred?
- Lukas.
- What time does he go to bed?
8:15.8:30.
What do you have to do
to put him to bed these days?
You've forgotten?
Yeah, I have forgotten.
Bed.
Okay, you don't know how we do it.
Then we watch a Modern Family.
- Now?
- Yes.
- Go get Daddy.
- Okay.
Not with your iPad.
I know.
Oh, my God, kids are
so much harder than war.
Oh, God.
Um...
I have all of the front pages here.
- Then that one.
- Yeah, I like that one.
That's the other one.
And then this is a very good one.
This one, obviously.
You know, the video of them
when they were getting mortared.
I mean, she didn't tell me about that.
And I saw it on,
on Twitter obviously first.
And she says to me, "Oh, shit.
Yeah, yeah, I didn't think
you'd see that."
So that was stressful.
But if you keep thinking
about those things,
it's going to drive you nuts.
So I don't.
I would have used the other photo.
I know...
I was a journalist
running the Reuters bureau.
So I think if we both
were going to do 24-hour news,
I mean, it's just difficult, right?
There's very few who are both journalists
and have a family.
And that's not even when you're going
to a danger zone.
It's just the news cycle.
It's kind of impossible.
Oh, my God, I'm so tired.
I didn't want her to change.
To be who she isn't.
Hi, Mom. Say hi to Paul.
Hi, Camille. How's it going?
Hi. Are you happy, boy?
I am. It's good to have her back.
Now, I don't have to get up
at 5:20 every morning.
I know!
It's the only reason he's happy.
When I first met him,
I remember thinking, like,
who is this arrogant guy, you know?
I thought she was really loud, American.
But we had become
really, really good friends.
They're totally,
totally different backgrounds.
Lynsey was brought up by hairdressers.
Paul comes from a kind of wealthy family.
His father is a count,
and he's a count or something,
I don't know.
Um, yeah. I mean, I grew up
very privileged, you know.
My father grew up all his life in France.
As a kid, he lived in a big
marble castle outside Monaco,
where we had a big private zoo.
Being in a relationship was something
I always sort of romanticized.
But the way I throw myself into my work,
it's all-consuming.
Most people can't deal with that.
I never expected I would find
someone like Paul.
You know, I was running
my teams and editing
and writing and doing breaking news.
I'd say, okay, I'm going, you know,
to Afghanistan for a month.
And he'd say, okay.
I knew I'd marry him.
She sent a mass email to a group of women
saying, "Guess what? I'm pregnant."
The next email was to me alone
to say, "And by the way,
I still want to do that story."
That's very much Lynsey.
You have a 10-week-old baby.
I do.
Are you going to keep doing this?
Do you ask men that question?
It's the question
I've gotten probably
300 times in the last 10 weeks.
I've only had a baby 10 weeks.
I started working three months
after giving birth,
but I sort of slipped in the roster
of who to call
when there were big stories.
Some editors gave me assignments,
stories that were a little softer
and less political.
But I'm a conflict photographer.
I do this work because
I want to have impact,
and I want to affect policy.
And to take that away
from me really became
like an identity crisis.
I started doubting everything
about myself and my career.
In 2018, I asked
the foreign picture editor
if I can cover Mosul, and he said,
"I'm not sending you Mosul.
You're a mother now."
I said, "Look,
if you have an issue with me",
"I will provide you tomorrow
with a list of ten women
you need to be hiring
for The New York Times."
He sits back, and he had a whiskey
in his hand, I'll never forget.
He sits back like this,
and he has a whiskey.
And he was like, um,
"I've worked for the
New York Times for seven years,
"and there just are no women
in the world good enough
for The New York Times."
There's very much a narrative today
that the profession
has been dominated by men.
But there have been women
photographing war
from the beginning of war photography.
The main challenge
is being underestimated.
The assumption is a female photographer
is somehow less equipped,
covering conflict
and covering high risk stories.
We want to really strive
for the visual authors
of our journalism to be as reflective
of the world that we're trying
to cover as possible...
which means that you need
the widest possible representation.
Cameras are in the hands
of more people than ever before.
That's shifting the kinds
of pictures we see,
the stories we're seeing.
So much happens in war
that is meant to never be seen.
In the Iraq War,
I remember just witnessing
all this brutality
I realized the fundamental
importance of journalism.
That was the moment
where I thought, this is everything to me.
I knew that I wouldn't do
anything else ever.
You know,
she's really good at what she does.
What that means, like,
really fundamentally, is
you go into, like,
these really terrible places
where most people wouldn't go
in a million years.
You kind of find your way in,
and you capture the human drama,
like in a second, and then you get out.
And she's really good at that.
You know, the proof of that
is, is in her pictures
and that she's still alive.
We were in Iraq for the worst of the war.
The Americans came and, like,
the country disintegrated
into anarchy.
And we were in the middle of that.
Allahu Akbar!
People didn't have electricity.
They couldn't get propane for cooking.
They couldn't get money out of the banks.
Chaos.
The protests...
kind of
the genesis of the insurgency.
I wanna do a raid story. Like a mystery.
We all lived in a house together.
The New York Times.
There were about five reporters
and a couple photographers.
I think we had 45 armed gunmen
protecting the place.
We had blast walls,
uh, belt-fed machine guns.
It was a fortress.
It was like a full-on fortress.
Eyewitnesses say gunmen opened fire,
killing at least four foreigners inside.
But the victims were wearing
civilian clothes
and bulletproof vests, commonly used
by foreign contractors, the media...
Before the invasion of Iraq,
there was still this kind
of unwritten rule
that, like, you don't kill
American reporters.
Completely different. Um, we were targets.
They were coming after us.
Lynsey and another reporter,
Jeffrey, got in a car.
They decided to go to Fallujah.
Terrible place. Very dangerous.
They got kidnapped.
They saw Jeffrey and they said,
we got an American.
They took him to their car.
You know, that's the end.
My first instinct is
they're gonna kill him.
And so I jumped out of the car
after Jeffrey and grabbed his arm
and said, "This man's my husband."
"He's my husband." Like this, you know.
Immediately, "Where are you from?
What are you doing here?"
And, of course, the last thing
you want to be in Iraq
at that point was an American.
So I took my two passports
and managed to slip them
in my underwear under my a bay a.
We're journalists.
I'm Italian. He's Greek.
She saved him.
They didn't know what to do.
And they finally said, okay, like,
get out of here.
And they let him go.
Um, that close.
Before that happened,
I thought I was invincible.
Journalists have definitely become targets
more and more.
Not only killed, but kidnapped,
beaten, threatened.
That is happening
increasingly around the world.
She is the twelfth Al Jazeera
journalist killed.
He was apparently
beheaded by ISIS militants.
Shelled by the Syrian military.
Go, go, go.
No helmet?
He's immortal.
Oh, fuck me. That's like...
Don't say that.
Jesus Christ, there's no wood.
Where are the Russian positions?
We drive just to Russian positions.
- Could be mines.
- Oh, Jesus Christ.
Be careful.
Tell me a little about your life
before you joined the military.
Oh, now I know that I have
a really great life before war.
I read a lot.
It was really simple
but really great life.
Yulia is one of the soldiers
I met on the second day of the war
who was a teacher.
The response to that photograph
of her was huge.
And, like, it encapsulated
so much of people who are just offering
themselves up despite how scared they are.
And so my idea is
to follow her for a year.
Did you imagine yourself, like,
getting married and having children?
And what do you think now
about your future?
No, it's really scared to have children
because I know
that I can do different things.
I don't be afraid about myself.
But if I have children,
it will be very difficult for me.
Are we in the quadrant of the city
- that gets hit all the time?
- Yeah.
And we're next to a military base.
- Yeah.
- Oh, fuck.
- Not very far away.
- No, no.
Fucking hell.
- It's close.
- Very close.
Should we not stay here?
- Yeah, probably.
- Let's go to the hospital.
Should we go to the hospital?
Some of the best stories are
in the most dangerous places.
I have to constantly weigh
what will I risk my life for?
And it's often civilians.
Those missiles you say
that have no shrapnel.
This is why bombs are lethal.
Because this flies
through you and you die.
We were in Zaporizhzhia
photographing the exodus out of Mariupol.
And it was while Mariupol
was still under siege.
There were families
who had lived underground
for six weeks.
Most people didn't make it out.
And the people who did,
they were just destroyed.
I heard a girl crying.
She and her mother escaped
the week before.
And they left her
18-year-old sister behind
because her 18-year-old sister
had a boyfriend
that she didn't want to leave.
The girl thought she would
never see her sister again.
And her sister pulled up a week later.
I do my hair toss check my nails
Baby, how you feeling?
Feeling good as hell!
Going to sleep thinking,
I hope a missile doesn't come
through my window at night.
Because we've been all been
sleeping in buildings where,
you know, that are next door to buildings
where the missile has come in
and simply by chance not been in them.
If it makes you happy
Hi, Lyns.
Hi, Mom.
How are you?
Good. You're frozen.
So I was supposed to leave today,
but there's a curfew.
Leave to come home? Oh, thank God.
Don't jinx it. I told Lisa that, she...
No, no, no, no, no, no,
I'm not jinxing it.
I'm just happy to see your face.
Because I don't turn on the TV. Yeah.
Yeah. Better you don't.
Uh, it's all fine.
There's nothing. It's fine.
We're totally safe here.
One of us would check in,
and we would just relay, like,
Lyns is fine, you know.
And then we would send it out
to the parents. To us.
That happened twice a day
the entire time she's in Ukraine.
Yeah, yeah.
So morning and evening check-ins.
I'm the youngest of four girls,
so I always looked up to my sisters
and wanted to be with them.
- She was a little...
- She was a whiner.
Kind of a pain in the ass, but fearless.
Like, from the day that she was born.
She didn't learn how to swim.
She just jumped in the pool
and started swimming.
The two middle ones
were attached to the hip,
and they always picked on her.
We would hang signs around her neck
when she was sleeping
that said, like, "I'm ugly."
Apparently, I opened up a can of soda
and poured it over her head.
But we often say that that's
what made her who she is today.
- Yeah.
- Because we toughened her up,
and we were relentless.
- She was at war.
- Yeah.
My parents were both
hairdressers in Connecticut.
There were a lot of creative people
that worked for us, and we had
a lot of creative friends.
They had parties constantly.
- Drag queens dressed up.
- It was very colorful.
Everybody was welcome. Always welcome.
Non-judgmental.
I think that's probably
more than anything.
I didn't grow up in a family
where we went to museums
or galleries on the weekend.
We were anything but intellectual.
You know, we didn't even have books
in our house growing up.
I remember our family being really happy.
And then when I was eight,
I remember my mom just,
like, piling us into the car
and driving to the parking lot and saying,
your dad is going to live
with a friend in New York
and he's not coming back.
And I thought, oh, he's going
to live with a roommate,
like he's going to live with a friend.
You know, I had no idea.
I did not connect the dots at all.
He was married,
so I assumed he wasn't gay.
But obviously I knew he was gay
when he approached me.
The transition from him
being our mom's best friend
to being our dad's boyfriend
was rougher on our mom, obviously.
For us, it didn't seem like a betrayal
because it was all very friendly,
but it was like the talk of the town.
And that part was really, really hard.
I really struggled with my dad.
We were always in touch.
I would go to his house.
But there was a lot of, like,
underlying resentment.
One of the clients gave my dad
a camera, and he gave it to me
when I was like 12 or 13.
I was obsessed, and I would
just stay in the dark room
until all hours of the night.
I wasn't really aware of photojournalism.
I studied international relations
and Italian at University of Wisconsin,
but when I graduated,
all I wanted to do was photograph.
I realized that you can
tell stories with pictures.
And then my camera became
this sort of excuse
for walking in and out of,
like, any situation,
I could just sort of say,
"I want to take pictures.
Can I come in?"
So I was traveling
and kind of meeting people
because I had a camera.
Mom!
- Mom!
- Alfred.
You want more bread, Alfie?
Cheese!
Alfred, are you going to be
a photographer like Mummy?
Yeah!
He's not allowed
to be a photographer!
Fears of renewed
strikes by Russian forces.
More than five
and a half thousand civilians
are thought to have been killed
in the fighting.
Lukas?
Yeah. I'm just...
I'm putting this away.
- What is that?
- Nothing.
What is this?
- What is it?
- It's a plate.
From my vest.
Lukas is definitely becoming more aware,
but he has a lot of, like,
protective mechanisms
where he just either shuts down
or he pretends like it doesn't matter.
He kind of just doesn't talk
about anything.
When the left
balance of the universe...
The teacher said
Alfred cried when another mom...
the kids said he's
seeing Mom after school.
- And Alfred...
- Oh, great, why don't you just
make me feel a little worse?
Why don't you?
- Holy crap.
- He was crying,
- and Sarah had to cuddle him.
- Oh, God.
It was a bit sensitive.
When I'm not shooting,
I'm so stretched thin.
I'm trying to close stories,
edit, caption.
All of this is very much on deadline.
Since the war,
she's been gone quite a lot, you know.
One month in Ukraine,
then maybe back two weeks, then maybe
speaking engagement or an exhibition
and then back a little bit.
- Your name is Mommy?
- Yeah, my name is Mommy.
Then Ukraine
and then something else.
If you want to stay relevant,
you got to be available all the time.
She's worried about it. Gets older.
You know, if she doesn't do these things,
even if she's an amazing photographer,
you know, they won't assign her.
One of us has to be
a constant in the kids' lives.
Paul left Reuters.
He started doing consulting.
That enabled us to have a family.
- Nice?
- Yeah.
- You like it?
- He's the one the school calls.
He's the one who goes
to all the PTA meetings.
He's the one who takes them
to school in the morning.
I've set it up so that if something
does happen to me, they have Paul.
So are you training every day now?
Yes.
And are you still scared?
Um. You know, I'm, uh...
All these weeks, I couldn't cry.
I don't know why,
because I saw terrible videos,
photos with, uh, that people, children...
Uh, but now I'm just angry,
and I'm not afraid now.
I know I'm gonna regret
not going to the forest position
- if I don't go.
- You are?
Yeah, of course I am.
I always regret everything.
You will regret going
if you lose your legs,
so, I mean...
I know.
Does anyone
actually man this weapon
or do they just keep it here?
We are waiting, ma'am, for the...
Oh, we're wait...
They're putting their makeup on.
Oh, my God.
The nose.
You definitely know you're
too far from the front line
if the soldiers have to go put
their flak jackets on for the media.
I-I can't deal with this.
Should we just go somewhere else?
I'll take a picture so they're happy
because they put on
clothes for the camera.
They probably bring journalists
here every day.
I'm in such a bad mood,
and this light is so bad.
I don't want to be on the front.
I need to be on the front.
It's too dangerous at the front.
Why are we at the front?
Welcome to the inner workings of my brain.
A war zone doesn't mean
there's, like, active combat
in every single part of the country.
In Ukraine, there are certain places
that get hit more than others.
But, like, in Kyiv, life goes on.
Ukraine has always been
one of the top places
for surrogacy around the world.
When the war started,
those families couldn't come
and pick up their babies.
And there were so many women
who were pregnant
with other people's babies.
- Without face.
- Without face. Okay.
And the kids are okay.
Okay. She doesn't know anyone
in the US at least.
Yeah, but it... just...
In case they're on the internet or...
These women
who give birth for other women
are sort of like these angels.
You know, they come in,
and they bring life
in situations where not everyone can.
We had a surrogate for Alfred...
and so, of course, I felt that connection.
I had a big car accident in 2009,
- Deep breath.
- Where I was thrown
out of a car on a highway in Pakistan.
My back got progressively
worse over the years,
and after I gave birth to Lukas,
everything kind of fell apart.
When we were thinking
about having another child,
for me, it just didn't even
seem like a possibility.
- You okay?
- Yeah.
I spend most of my free time
just getting strong again
to go on assignment.
- Oh, shit.
- I did it!
Only 20 kilos.
Exercise is a major part of my life.
It's how I ground myself.
It's where I give myself
the space to process things.
It's the only way I'm going
to be able to stay
in this profession
longer than a few years.
This is my life, you know.
She is on a mission, always,
singly focused and singly driven
about what she needs to do in the world.
She will do that at all costs.
When each of us got married,
our dads gave us $10,000
for our wedding gift.
Lyns went to Dad and Bruce
and said, "I'm never getting married,
so I want the ten grand
to buy camera equipment."
In the late '90s, I worked for the AP.
But my interest has always been abroad,
so I moved to India in 2000.
I started becoming aware
of women's issues...
and the fact that
most women around the world
don't have any basic rights.
Going to Afghanistan under the Taliban.
Girls are only allowed to stay in school
until they're about 12.
Women were not able to leave the house
without their husband's permission
or work outside of the home.
Many had been abused or been forced
into arranged marriages.
When I first started working
in Afghanistan,
I couldn't give away
those pictures for free.
And then September 11th happened.
Just when all the news organizations
were trying to figure out
all those different stories
related to the aftermath
of what had happened, she had the idea.
She said she wanted to tell the story
of the women of the jihad.
Showing a true picture
of this community
that very few people knew
what really happened behind closed doors.
The kind of work she does,
a lot of people choose
to go to black and white,
which allows you to do something
a little bit more metaphorical or poetic.
Not her.
Partly what defines
a great photojournalist
is the eye and the ability
to make memorable images,
but also to be able to go out
and find the story,
get access to the story.
In western Afghanistan,
it was very common for a woman
who wanted to commit suicide,
she would douse herself
in gasoline or some sort of oil
and set herself on fire, often not dying.
I spent, like, a week in a hospital,
in a burn unit,
watching, like, woman after woman,
sometimes girls, come in,
like, charred to a crisp,
and you smell them before you see them.
All of them had been abused.
And I realized, like, that's why
women are setting themselves on fire.
Because anything is better
than their lives.
And I remember getting,
like, so overwhelmed.
I can't do this. Like, I can't
internalize, like,
this pain and this, like, abuse.
I was overwhelmed
with this sense of injustice.
I realized that I can really
get into the lives of women
with my camera and with reporting.
With who?
Hmm?
Hmm.
Lynsey has a very distinct ability
to go places men are not welcome, right?
So she can cover huge parts
of the story that they can't.
She wants to make pictures that are stark
and show the reality as close as she can,
hoping that it will have an effect.
When I met Mamma Sessay,
she had delivered
the first twin in the village,
and the second baby wouldn't come out.
She had to take a canoe to the ambulance,
in the ambulance on bumpy roads
for about six hours
to get to the hospital.
Oh, my God!
She finally delivered the second baby.
What is this?
What's all the blood from, the placenta?
At that point, I didn't know
anything about childbirth.
- 60/40?
- Yeah.
She's becoming
more and more out of it.
So I stopped photographing,
and I said to the midwives,
"Where is the doctor?"
Well, there's one doctor
in the whole province,
and he's probably in surgery.
So I ran to the surgical ward, and I said,
"I think there's a woman dying."
And at this point, I'm obviously involved,
which I, you know,
I probably shouldn't be,
but I'm watching a woman dying.
The doctor came out,
took her blood pressure.
And she was dead.
At that time, over 500,000 women a year
were dying in childbirth,
and a majority of those cases
were completely preventable.
I wanted it to be published
so that perhaps it could bring
some sort of change.
Hi, Alfred.
You should still be asleep.
It's only 6:30. Come, come.
Come, come.
No, no, no, no. It's 6:30, Alfred.
Come on, come on.
I'll take you to your room.
I'm hungry.
Yeah, but in a minute. Come on.
Alfred.
Where's my... Where's my Mummy?
Mummy is working, Alfred.
Is she downstairs?
She's in another country,
but she's going to come back soon.
There you go.
But you have to say cheers.
- Cheers.
- Cheers.
British Airways.
Flight eight...
It's the length of assignments.
That's always been the challenge
in our relationship.
If it's one week, two weeks,
it's not really a big deal.
But when it gets longer,
over three weeks is always...
Things tend to unravel at home.
Careful, Alfred. Ah-ah!
Okay! Okay!
Snap! Snap!
In my heart, all I want
to be doing is shooting.
It's frustrating. I'm constantly tortured.
Like, I'm not in the right place.
But I come back.
I'm supposed to be really happy,
and I feel like I should be there,
and I feel like a bad journalist
because I'm not.
My head is always where I'm not.
Hi, Lukas.
When are you coming back?
Oh, like ten days.
- Oh.
- I know, my love.
It's the compromise, right?
She wants to do all of the things
and be at home as well.
And it's just not possible.
Everything has gotten delayed.
I may not get home till Saturday.
I suck as a parent.
I suck as a journalist.
I'm always compromising.
I can't do it. I'll switch with someone.
No, no, no, no.
This is what you gotta do.
He's asked for it constantly.
This is Alfred's thing.
I mean, are you seriously not gonna...
Why don't you just be a mother?
Daddy, Daddy, I love you.
With Alfred, all of a sudden,
there was mega regression.
Wetting the bed and stuff.
A fresh round of missiles
pummeled Ukraine this weekend.
Hardest hit this residential...
With Lukas, there will be moments
when he sees Ukraine missiles stuff on TV.
I don't really know
what you do to, to prevent
the kind of anxiety
being created, you know.
pitch darkness,
rescue workers raced overnight.
God.
Here we can shoot, right?
Let's go. Yeah.
The Russians entered this town?
Oh, my God.
We picked the wrong fucking day.
When you're working in a war zone,
you really are timing
things down to the minute.
Lynsey is conscious
of those limits,
but she wants to take it
right up to that edge,
to where we're both feeling
pretty uncomfortable
about being in a place.
Lynsey will just continue
to press and press and press
until she gets what she needs.
Oh, Jesus.
Fuck. Fuck. I hate this.
People always ask me, and I know
they ask Lynsey the same thing,
are you addicted to the adrenaline?
You know, are you, like, a war junkie?
Very few people
have been able to do that
for any sustained period of time
without destroying their lives.
All you have to do is, like,
look at the scorecard.
Divorced. Divorced. Divorced.
Having an affair. Drinks too much.
In a massive show of force
not seen since the Cold War...
I think what you are addicted to
is the largeness of it.
Possibly the biggest land war
that Europe has seen
since the Second World War.
These countries, they change so fast.
Ukrainian troops
recaptured Kherson this month.
It's like history on fast forward.
Everything's accelerated.
It's an amazing thing
to be in the middle of.
You're breathing pure oxygen
the whole time.
I'm most present
when I'm working.
I feel like I'm home.
I feel most inspired and exhilarated
when I'm covering something
that I know will contribute
to the historical picture
of what happened.
The fall of the Taliban.
The Iraq War.
The Korangal Valley in Afghanistan.
When we asked to go
to the Korangal Valley,
it was the place where the United States
was dropping the most bombs
in the country.
The Pentagon would not allow
women soldiers on the front line.
But there was not the same
mandate for journalists.
Every single day,
the platoons had to go out and patrol.
Instead of carrying weapons,
Lynsey would have, like,
cameras and lenses
strapped to her all over the place.
Almost like clockwork on their way back,
they would get shot at.
If they weren't physically fit enough,
they would put us in danger.
But those two women are...
they're hard as woodpecker lips.
They earned our trust very quickly.
We spent more or less
two months with these guys
and had various conversations,
talked about their lives,
what they wanted to do when they got out.
Rock Avalanche
was the most arduous operation
they were both a part of.
The idea was
to jump out of helicopters
in the middle of the night into the heart
of Taliban territory,
assuming the Taliban would fire at us
so that the US military could fire back,
and it would basically
show their position.
We could get one
going from west to east
into that, over.
Over.
We had Tim He the ring ton.
He was with one platoon.
We had Lynsey and Elizabeth,
were located with me.
And we know something's about to happen.
We just don't know
when it's going to happen.
We don't know where
it's going to come from.
Trees blocked you from ever
being able to see the enemy.
So it was like you were fighting ghosts.
Throughout the whole time,
Lynsey, I don't want to say she's begging,
but she's being very persistent.
She wants to be where the fight
is going to potentially be.
And almost as soon
as Lynsey got down there,
the valley erupted.
It was so chaotic in the moment.
There were bullets everywhere.
We were ambushed from three sides.
There were three people down.
And then I see them coming out
holding the body bag.
I started crying,
and I stopped and I said, "Is it okay?
Like, can I, can I take a picture?"
And he said, "Yeah."
There's a lot that we ask our soldiers
at a young, young age.
You probably question the same stuff
that I did every single night,
"What am I doing here?"
Our nation needs to understand
what the cost of war is.
What Lynsey and everybody
in that profession does,
I think it's critical.
It's-it's more than just a profession.
It's almost a duty or a calling.
War is always so distant
because of the ban on photographing
caskets coming back to America.
The price that so many thousands
of families have paid
that no one ever documents,
either because we're censored
or we're not there
or we can't get permission to publish.
I do not agree that we should censor war.
When we make a decision
to invade a country,
people have to understand
the consequences.
All of this coverage provides
the international community with proof
of how Russians dealt with people
and treated people and killed people.
How are you feeling now?
Did you think you would still be here?
Um...
The first days, I hope, uh,
that war will finish
maybe in a few months.
And now I understand that...
it can be years and years.
The first two weeks or ten days,
I didn't know who I am.
It was terrible for me because
I know that I am a teacher,
I'm Yulia, I'm a friend, I'm a daughter.
Such a big face.
Me too. When I was that age,
I had a big face.
Aww.
Now I know who I am.
I have new friends. I have new family.
The amount of difficult stories
that I've done,
it's, it's a lot.
And so I wonder where all that lives
in my head and my heart.
You know, it's like I know it's there,
and I know I speak about it
very sort of methodically,
but it's hard to look at.
It's a strange way to...
It's a strange way to live
because... Lynsey, for instance,
like she's seeing,
she's seeing a lot of pain,
often every day.
So you basically condition yourself
to, like, put that in a box,
you know, turn the key.
Maybe Lukas should have this for dinner.
No.
Mommy's gonna love that dinner, Alfred.
It's making me look good. Now!
Are you looking forward to seeing her?
- Yep.
- Hmm? How much?
- More.
- More than what?
Anything.
She's a worker...
a photographer and a worker.
Oh. Who's that?
Mama.
Did you know?
- Did you know I was coming?
- Yeah.
Oh, my love!
Mama!
Mama! Mama! Mama!
Are you excited, Alfred?
You see how quickly
he became a superhero.
It's quite innovative.
Has he been like this since I left or...
What you mean? Well, he's excited.
No. Oh!
Careful with my eyeballs.
What would Mommy be without my eyeballs?
You'd be nothing.
Exactly.
Lukas?
Hi, Dad.
Hi, Mom.
Hi!
Hi, my love. Hi.
Oh, I missed you so much.
- Mama.
- Hi.
It's the best day ever.
I wish always to have you.
- To have me?
- Mm.
- Home.
- Never to go away.
I know, but Mommy has to work.
You... You never have to go
to work ever again.
Really?
- I have to, my love.
- It's your last time.
- Ever going to work?
- Yeah.
How about one day, and that's it?
I mean, one day is a little difficult.
- But...
- Well, how about three days,
That's it. Three. One...
One, two, three. And that's it.
- You go back.
- And I come back?
Yeah.
I mean, it depends on where I go.
Some places that I go,
it's like really far away.
So if I go for...
You know, sometimes
it takes three days for me
to even get where I go, you know?
Does that make sense?
How about you go
to the closest place ever?
You mean you want me to work in London?
- No.
- Hmm, I can't do that.
You.
I mean, he needs, like,
a Valium is what he needs.
I mean, I don't know
how anyone can deal with him 24/7.
He's really, like... He's so energetic.
I think he needs,
you know, a bit of a change.
He needs to be in a calm environment.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We did talk in depth about
the importance of, you know,
covering Ukraine, and I did agree to it
and said I thought it was a good idea
that she does it.
I didn't think it would be
going on for this long,
I'm gonna put it that way.
The main issue that we have
to be very careful about
is that we just start leading
totally separate lives.
Paul, I-I just... I've been...
That happened before.
He shut down,
and we went through a really tough time,
and we started going to couples therapy
and, like, we did a lot of work.
"Phoebe, I love you,
"but my work is my life,
and that's what I have to do right now."
And I say, "Your work, your work?
How can you say that?"
And then you say, um,
"It's tearing me apart."
That sounds like conversations we've had.
Lukas, what do you have
tomorrow after school?
Do you want Black Cat again
for the dinner party on Saturday?
Why... What's going on?
Why are you having a spasm?
How are you so ticklish?
Alfred talks, you know,
all the time when you're coming.
Oh.
Hi, my little muffin.
He understands time now,
and he's very attached to you,
weirdly enough.
Did you turn 10 while I was gone?
How old are you now?
Not yet.
Are you? Do you tell everyone you're five?
You're almost five.
There's only so much I can control,
- you know.
- Yeah, I know.
But I'm not planning on doing another,
like, four-to six-week rotation.
No, not right now.
Right after we got married,
he was like, "Okay, let's start a family."
And I was like, "No way."
She wouldn't have done it
without my kind of pushing.
I've always pictured myself with a family
because I grew up
with such a loving family.
But, um, like, not today, you know,
I was kind of at the height of my career.
I didn't know any female photographers
who had kids.
I couldn't envision
how my life would look.
Paul was, like, very serious.
You know, we were having this dinner,
and he was just like,
"You know, I want a family."
I didn't fully understand
how hard it is,
particularly in her type of work.
It's easy for the guy to have a kid,
you're running a bureau,
you don't have to go anywhere,
there's no problem really, right?
And I think I viewed it
a bit like that too, at the time.
Hey, come on.
I said we should
be married at least a year.
So I negotiated basically
that January 1st, 2011,
I would go off the pill.
So I did, but then
I never went home.
I went to South Sudan...
to Iraq.
And then the Arab Spring started.
Massive protests
over government corruption,
political repression.
Similar demonstrations have popped up
in Yemen and Algeria.
It's now spreading
all across the region,
particularly to Libya,
where Muammar Gaddafi runs one of the most
repressive regimes in the entire region.
I had covered the Middle East
and North Africa for years,
and I said, I want to go to Libya.
It was the end of February 2011.
I was based in Benghazi
and covering this sort
of parallel government
being set up by the youth
in eastern Libya.
We kind of pushed forward
with the first group of volunteers.
Gaddafi's military had
exponentially more weapons,
technology, trained fighters.
I hear a plane.
There was nowhere to hide.
The landscape was totally flat
and a bomb would just drop next to us.
Every day. It was terrifying.
I had been two weeks on the front line.
Every single day. Completely pummeled.
I called my editor and said,
"I need to get out of here."
And he said, "Okay."
And the team at that point
was Anthony Shadid,
Steve Farrell, Tyler Hicks.
Tyler Hicks is, to the rest of the world,
one of the most famous,
intrepid war photographers.
Tyler Hicks, to me,
is someone I grew up with.
I've known him since I was 13 years old.
I freelanced, but Tyler is staff,
and he's like the primary
New York Times photographer.
And the editor told him,
"I think you should stay."
So I was like,
"Okay, I'll stay with Tyler."
Like, I'm not gonna leave Tyler alone.
For whatever reason that day,
I had this horrible premonition.
Things were getting
really tense on the front line.
And all these artillery rounds
were coming in,
literally being bracketed
on the position we were at.
Muhammad, our driver,
started getting calls from his brother.
"Gaddafi's troops are in the city.
You have to get out."
And Gaddafi repeatedly told his military,
if you see journalists, they're spies,
and you should just execute them.
They are spreading lies
on radios and televisions.
We're all journalists
who entered illegally.
I am freaking out.
But I don't want to say anything
because I'm the only woman.
And Mohammed starts screaming,
like, "We have to get out of here."
And as we get on the main road,
way off in the distance,
I see these little figurines of soldiers.
And I said, "You guys,
that's Gaddafi's troops ahead."
We get to the checkpoint.
Gaddafi's troops, like pointing
their guns, screaming,
"Get out! Stop the car! Stop the car!"
Mohammed stops the car,
opens the door, and just, like,
throws his arms up and says,
"Sahafen." Journalists.
There are Gaddafi's troops everywhere.
I was staring down the barrel of the gun
and I looked to the right,
and I see Tyler,
Anthony, and Steve all begging.
And our young driver, Muhammad,
he was executed.
I was running the Reuters operation
in India, in Delhi.
I got a call from...
I guess in the evening...
from Tyler's girlfriend Nikki, saying,
have you heard from, uh,
from Lynsey or Tyler? And I said no.
That was...
I... I was home,
but I was on my way to my mother's,
and I checked my voicemail.
The CEO of The New York Times
left a message for me to call him.
So I called and he says,
um, "Mrs. Addario.
We have, um, sad news."
So I dropped the phone.
I had my receptionist talk to them
at The New York Times
because I, I just couldn't...
talk to them and then come back...
The woman said to me,
"Oh, please stop. It's okay. Just go home.
I don't care when you cut my hair."
I says, "I have to do this."
My toes, I think on my right foot
where I put my pressure,
are permanently curled
because all I kept doing
was digging my foot in the ground.
No word from
four New York Times journalists.
Lynsey Addario is among the missing.
I'll talk to her husband in
an exclusive interview. Up next.
I appeal to-to Muammar Gaddafi
and his son and the others to find them
and to bring them back safely
and to bring my Lynsey,
you know, back here.
It hadn't been the first kidnapping.
And quite a few other people had died.
I mean, I was sleepless.
I'm going to say, you know,
you got to come back here
because, you know, we got to have kids.
You know, that-that's my, uh...
I've been trying to, you know, to get...
- The day Paul went on...
- I was just gonna...
I totally hadn't even cried
until that point.
He came on and I saw Paul's face,
and I heard him say that,
and I just burst into tears.
Not knowing whether she was dead,
alive, or sexually abused...
that was probably
the worst time of my whole life.
The first three days,
they were super violent.
We were all blindfolded and bound.
They were really, like, beating the shit
out of Tyler, Anthony, and Steve.
There was a guy who was just,
like, caressing my face
and saying something over and over,
and I said, "Anthony, what is he saying?"
And he said,
"You're going to die tonight."
We drove for hours all along the front line
through these very hostile
villages loyal to Gaddafi.
Every time we would slow down
at a checkpoint,
crowds would come and try and pull us
out of the truck and beat us up.
There was a soldier next to me,
and he was touching me everywhere.
My first thought was,
I just don't want to be raped.
Editors at The New York Times
say they were last in touch
with their journalists on Tuesday Morning.
We didn't know if they were alive
or if they were dead.
I'd stay up 24/7
speaking to contacts,
to the Turkish President
and Prime Minister...
first to find out if they were alive
and then to try to get them out.
They brought us to this room
and sat us down on the rug.
They took off our blindfolds
and we're all, like,
looking at one another.
And he was like, "Okay, you're safe now.
We're not going to beat you anymore."
And everyone was just, like, crying.
Like basically everyone
was just, like, destroyed.
One of the Libyan officials
handed me his cell phone,
and I was like...
And I put it to my ear, and it was Paul.
He basically just said, uh,
"You're getting released,"
"and I'll meet you in Tunisia."
All four New York Times journalists
who were captured and held
for six days were released.
She was a basket case.
I think we all were.
She cried a lot,
and it was very emotional.
You have faced, uh, the-the fear
of-of losing your life
in the line of reporting duty.
You were sexually assaulted?
I was groped. Um, I was groped repeatedly.
- How often?
- Pretty much every time we...
every time we changed hands to new men.
So she's very open what happened,
and, and I think that helped a lot.
We talked about the things that you think,
the influence you feel you have
by taking these
remarkably moving photographs
and letting the world know
about the perils,
particularly of women,
but of people who are in danger.
Is it worth it?
It's a hard question.
I mean, I certainly in the middle of this
with my... when I was
blindfolded and bound
and getting punched in the face,
I said, "Why do I do this?
Who cares about Libya?
Why do I care about Libya?"
You know, these are questions
I asked myself repeatedly.
I do it because I believe in it.
But is it worth my life?
Is it worth doing this
to the people I love?
It's a difficult question.
It took a while.
I think that there are
very few people on the planet
who can understand how we live our lives,
and why we do what we do.
We're following the latest
on a story of two journalists
who gave their lives to cover the story.
They were killed yesterday
covering the war in Libya.
Chris Hondros and
Tim He the ring ton were hit by...
Tim He the ring ton
I was with in the Korangal.
And Chris Hondros is someone
I've known forever.
Tim and Chris' death sent me over the edge
in a way that our own kidnapping didn't.
I couldn't understand why we survived
and they didn't.
"I was just like, " Fuck this.
Enough. Enough death."
I had to pull back and get my bearings,
figure out emotionally
how much I could cope with
and not only me, how much
my family could cope with.
One day, I got a phone call.
He said, I am a board member
at Merck, the pharmaceutical company.
I would like to tell you
a story about Mamma Sessay.
He said when that story came out,
I put a copy of the story
in front of every board member,
and they unanimously decided
to put $500 million aside
to fight maternal death.
Doctors Without Borders
also had seen the story,
and they implemented an ambulance program
in Bo Province.
In that province alone,
they reduced
the maternal death rate by 60%.
For me, it was like one of those moments.
I see a lot of women die.
I see a lot of people die.
And somehow, it felt like
something came out of it,
and maybe it could help people.
You never get used to having
a sister who's a war photographer, right?
- Mm-hmm.
- You can't really overthink it,
because then you'll never
be able to function.
- Almost like, what's the point?
- You can't. Right.
Is that for the meat or the chicken?
Yeah. Cheers!
Cheers!
She knows that I worry about her.
I asked her, "You're not
going back, are you?"
"Yes. Maybe in August."
So we... The conversation
ended there because...
what are you going to do?
Tell her you can't go.
Even though we ain't got money
- Oh, another... Loggins.
- I'm so in love
With you, honey
Everything will bring
A chain of love
In the morning when I rise
Bring a tear of joy to my eyes
Are you crying?
The PTSD is kicking in.
- This is what happens.
- Oh, Lyns!
- Lyns.
- Every once in a while
when you least expect it, she breaks down.
God, we're singing like Kenny Loggins.
Ah.
Well, that put a damper on that one.
I know.
- How was school?
- Good.
- Yeah?
- Yeah.
Are we gonna get
a call from Mr. Bullard?
- No.
- Pollard.
Isn't it Payson Bullard?
- Yeah.
- Yeah. See?
I know something.
One of the few things
about school you know.
Lukas, stick up for me.
At least you now know
where, where the school is.
Oh.
I know where the school is.
I've always known where the school is.
I don't know where their classrooms are,
but I know where the school is.
I mean, when Mommy's at work,
you're kind of watching Netflix.
Yeah. Thanks, Lukas.
I mean, I'm working hard.
She's on the phone a lot.
Lukas, how come
you don't pick up when I call?
The only time you wrote me
when I was in Ukraine
was just to ask me
to put money in your account.
And then I ask you how you are.
Do you miss me?
I love you. You don't answer.
Lukas has said I don't want you to go.
And do you have to go back to Ukraine.
If Lukas, who barely
expresses anything, asks that,
it's definitely weighing on him.
People think, how can you still
go to war as a mother?
There is something way bigger
than any of us.
And I think it sort of takes over.
Something that starts as like
a try this, you dabble in it,
and then it becomes like a mission,
and then it becomes your life.
And then it becomes a responsibility.
869 dead in eight years of war.
A battleground
for more than 20 years.
Tens of thousands
of refugees have fled the...
More than
10,000 people in Yemen have died.
Two million
others have been displaced.
Millions near starvation.
All victims of a war the world's ignored.
People have a tendency to move on.
It's my job to get people
to continue paying attention.
I have dedicated most
of my career to Afghanistan.
And there I was back in the country
when the Taliban had come back,
and again, it had fallen off the radar.
All of the things that I had covered.
What's her name? Salam.
The programs and the funding
and the schooling,
it was taken away overnight.
Nine days
after the brutal terrorist attack
by Hamas, Israel ramps up
for a ground war in Gaza.
The humanitarian crisis continues
to get even worse because
there's 1.1 million people...
I've covered war
for 20 plus years,
and I can't believe
what we're watching right now.
Foreign press
almost completely blocked
from entering Gaza.
Sometimes I feel really helpless.
I just keep shooting
and keep moving forward.
I have to keep convincing myself
that it's worth it
and that it makes a difference
because I would not be able
to keep doing this work
if I didn't believe in it.
And if I didn't believe
that it was worth the toll
that it takes on my loved ones.
It's pretty busted up here.
- Wait.
- It is a photo shoot. Look.
Stop! Stop!
That's amazing.
Watch your step.