E-Team

The emergencies team at Human Rights Watch is made up of researchers who are among the first into war zones. Their work is to document war crimes and report them to the world. The documentary follows four of them both in the field and at home: they walk into a bombed neighbourhood in Syria, gather evidence in Libya, and then go back to their children. Katy Chevigny and Ross Kauffman directed it together, and it screened at Sundance in 2014, where it took the cinematography award. What makes the film interesting is that the people doing this work are not presented as heroes: they are tired, they argue, they deal with their families. The telling looks not at which side is right but at whether the record is being kept. The attacks in Syria and Libya are its main material.