War Photographer

Christian Frei's War Photographer earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature at the 74th Academy Awards in March 2002, only the second Swiss documentary ever to receive an Oscar nomination in the category. It went on to win the Peabody Award in 2003 and earned an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Non-Fiction Special in 2004. Frei is generally treated as the most internationally accomplished Swiss documentarist of his generation.

The film is built around James Nachtwey, the American photojournalist who had spent the preceding twenty-five years documenting major armed conflicts and humanitarian crises across Cambodia, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, Chechnya and Kosovo. Nachtwey is generally regarded as one of the two or three most important war photographers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; he holds the Robert Capa Gold Medal multiple times and the Dr Erich Salomon Award from the German Society for Photography.

Frei's distinctive technical achievement is the use of a small camera mounted directly on Nachtwey's still-camera body during shooting, which captures the photographer's gesture from his own approximate sightline as he frames each individual still image. The synchronisation of Nachtwey's professional still photography with the live cinema recording is one of the most-discussed innovations in contemporary documentary practice and has been imitated in subsequent profiles of working photojournalists. The film was shot across four years (1996-2000) on Nachtwey's actual assignments in Kosovo, Indonesia, Palestine and Rwanda.