“It’s About Pursuing ‘Truth’ and How Each Journalist Interprets That Word for the Rest of Us”: Yung Chang on His TIFF-Debuting This Is Not a Movie

Long a thorn in the establishment’s side, veteran foreign correspondent Robert Fisk has spent the past four-decades-plus reporting “subjectively” from frontlines the world over, most notably in the Middle East. An Arabic speaker, who interviewed Osama bin Laden three times before 9/11, Fisk has forever served “on the side of the suffering,” political implications be damned. Unsurprisingly, this has caused the Beirut-based Brit to become a controversial, if highly respected, figure, labeled both human rights advocate and terrorist sympathizer alike.

Now in his seventies and still dodging bullets, both literally and figuratively, Fisk continues to file columns for The Independent (he left The Times soon after Murdoch purchased it) with a near-religious dedication. It’s a dedication perhaps matched only by Canadian documentarian Yung Chang (Up the Yangtze, China Heavyweight), who tags along with Fisk on his current reporting crusades — and in the process paints a revealing cinematic portrait of an uncompromising journo hellbent on exposing modern-day news’s (i.e., Murdoch’s) “fair and balanced” charade. As Fisk himself damningly puts it at one point in Chang’s riveting This Is Not a Movie, if he were covering the Nazi death camps he would not be seeking comment from the SS spokesman.

Filmmaker had the good fortune to catch up with the Ottawa-born Chang just prior to his fourth feature’s Toronto premiere (September 9 and 11).

To read my interview visit Filmmaker magazine.