Which Way is the Front Line from Here?

“He didn’t see a division between being a photographer or a videographer or a journalist or a humanitarian or a participant. He was just Tim,” says a colleague about Tim Hetherington. Which Way to the Front Line from Here? is a portrait by Sebastian Junger, who co-directed Oscar-nominated Restrepo (Mountainfilm 2010) with Hetherington. The affable Hetherington captured the horrors of war through his lens, not in an attempt to understand it as a geopolitical or military subject, but as one friend says, to answer the question: “How do young men see themselves in war and why?” The only way to find out was from the front lines and in April 2011, Hetherington went to Libya where a civil war was in full throttle. While traveling in Misrata, he was killed. As Junger says in the film, “The core reality of war isn’t that you might get killed out there — that’s obvious. The core truth of war is that you’re guaranteed to lose your brothers.”