Journalists get their flowers in ‘Love+War’ and ‘Cover-Up’

Two documentaries that played at the Toronto Film Festival show us the human side of intrepid journalists

- Pahull Bains

(clockwise, from above) Stills from 'Love+War'; Seymour Hersh in his office, 2009; Hersh in his office at the Washington bureau of 'The New York Times', 1975

(PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY TRE)

At a time when journalists are increasingly discredited, vilified or out-and-out targeted for doing their jobs, two documentaries at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival, which concluded on 14 September, highlight why their work is so vital.

After 20 years of being behind the camera, American war photographer Lynsey Addario turns to face the lens in Love+War, from Oscar-winning film-making duo Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. As a war photographer covering conflicts and humanitarian crises around the world—including in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Ukraine—Addario is indefatigable in her quest to document the human cost of war, often at her own peril.

The documentary chronicles Addario’s career over the past two decades, book-ended by recent assignments in Ukraine. In the early days of the war in 2022, she took a photograph of a local family killed by mortar strike right in front of her eyes. The image landed on the front page of The New York Times, refuting Putin’s claims that the Russian military was not targeting civilians. The Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist has also documented life in Afghanistan both preand post-9/11, covered the Libyan civil war during the Arab Spring in 2011, and shed light on Sierra Leone’s high maternal mortality rates.