Armed Only With A Camera: The Life And Death Of Brent Renaud

Bluesky

69 journalists and associated media workers died when covering conflict situations in 2022. Brent Renaud was one of them.

A short documentary assembled from Brent and his team’s archive footage, together with home videos and a small quantity of present day footage, this is a tribute led by Brent’s young brother Craig, who followed him into the profession and was present with him on some of the assignments it references. It includes footage of Ukrainian people looking after his body after he was ambushed by Russians, of the car where he was shot, and of him lying in his coffin. “Brent always felt it was important not to hide from the reality of what violence and war does to people,” says Craig.

Nominated for an Oscar, the film opens in Honduras with Brent talking to a teenage migrant, and follows him around the world, taking in the invasion of Ukraine, the US wars on Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, the streets of Chicago in 2017, and more. We see him filming explosions, being yelled at that it’s time to run, but mostly we see him with people. An Iraqi mother shows him baby photos of her dead son. A Ukrainian man stands in the ruins of his home, lamenting “This is how Russians fight. This is a crime.” Another man, in Afghanistan, writhes on the ground by the side of a crater, tells him about the helicopter whose pilot must have realised it was firing on women and children; now all but one of his sons are dead. These are the stories that mattered to Brent, Craig explains: those of civilians caught in the middle.

Brent was autistic and found it hard to get close to people, which made the friendship between the brothers all the more important. His best friend besides Craig was his dog, Chai. We see footage on them dancing and going on road trips together. one wonders what happened to Chai. Volodymyr Zelenskyy paid tribute to Brent on the day he died. A pentagon spokesperson and numerous journalists followed suit, but how does one explain to a dog why its human has not come home?

The film is a little haphazard in structure, but is anything, this is an asset, reflecting he chaotic nature of Brent and Craig’s lives. It ends with images of other journalists killed in the lines of duty. Last year they numbered 129. The cost of telling the truth, of raising ordinary people’s voices, keeps getting higher – yet from childhood, Craig tells us, it was all that Brent wanted to do with his life.

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