The Art of Journalism: Kapuscinski on Film

We try to bring you the cutting edge of the cutting edge here at the FAD.  So, far in advance of a movie that you might eventually see and love (see below), for our readers in Valencia, Spain, (!) we bring the announcement that a selection of Ryszard Kapuscinski's photographs taken in Cold War Russia will be on display at the Valencian Modern Art Museum.

Why even bring it up? Well: ask yourself, when was the last time you opened the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or any other paper, for that matter, and read a dispatch from abroad that was so vivid, so captivating, that it called to mind literary greats?  Or that made you say, "this would make a great movie?"

Kapuscinski was Poland's foremost foreign correspondent for decades.  If you haven't read his accounts of, say, the downfall of Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie, the Angolan Civil War, or the Soccer War in Central America, you are missing out on some serious Indiana Jones mixed with Hunter S. Thompson, with some Naipaul or Theroux mixed in.  So, fear not, we bring you the trailer based on his account of the war that broke out in Angola immediately upon independence:

Shot in the animated-documentary mode of the Award Winning Waltz With Bashir, an Israeli soldier's account of his role in the Lebanon War, this cinematic experience will no doubt be infinitely more exciting - and more stylish - than the usual Hollywood trash (we're looking at you, Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug).

And remember, you heard it here first.