Love+War, the latest project produced by Little Monster Films, helmed by the dynamic documentarian duo of Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chair Vasarhelyi (Free Solo), couldn’t be more different — in style and impact — than their recent effort Lost in the Jungle, also released in 2025. While Lost in the Jungle relies on extensive talking head interviews and filtered recreations to evoke its story of desperate survival, Love+War places us immediately in the hands of famed war photographer Lynsey Addario as she covers the then unfolding Russian invasion of Ukraine. Chin and Vasarhelyi have directed six feature films since winning the Academy Award for Free Solo, and none have matched the brutal, singular intensity of that film’s subject in quite the same way — until Love+War.
The film still utilizes talking head interviews — not sparingly, but tastefully. They are incorporated as flavoring, contextualizing the various emotional states behind the raw, nearly unfiltered boots-on-the-ground documentation. The lasting impression of the film will be one of unsparing chaos, of footage captured on from the very edge of danger. We follow Lynsey and her camera though the early days of the war in Ukraine, our view bobbing and weaving as Addario and her partner, Ukrainian journalist Andriy Dubchak, search for shelter from incoming Russian missiles. In one shockingly poignant early moment, Addario and Dubchak encounter a woman going about her usual business, strolling about the neighborhood when the air raid alarm is sent out. The woman seems surprised by their concern, but shuffles them into her basement for shelter anyways. Minutes later we watch as missiles crash down on the street where civilian refugees are huddled. Addario rushes out from the building with her camera, Dubchak following with his, and we see behind the scenes as she snaps one of the most defining pictures of her career, an image that for the first time exposed the threat posed to civilian populations by the war.
Moments such as these, when we are being given access to the human realities behind the pictures, even as they are being taken, make Love+War feel essential and truthful. It’s the promise made by photojournalists and documentarians throughout history, that the moment captured isn’t edited, refined, or compromised, and these stretches of documentary filmmaking — shocking glimpses of real experiences before and after tragedy strikes — are among the most visceral to be found in the film medium this year. Our society has grown somewhat accustomed to seeing images like these within the context-free void of social media, but here, cushioned by the carefully constructed conventions of narrative filmmaking, they gather meaning.
Love+War bears some superficial comparison with 2024’s Civil War, which follows fictional photojournalists through the dystopian hellscape of a alternate contemporary America descending into conflict. But where that heightened fictional conceit sought provocation in its content, it’s the real people found here who impart more personal drama and emotional catharsis. In stark contrast to the fictional protagonists of Civil War, Lynsey Addario is a complex personality, who strives toward the impossible at all times while contradicting herself, doubting her own intuition, questioning her own motives, struggling constantly with the push and pull between raw documentation and personal expression. She is an outspoken character, and throughout we hear her voicing her fears, her anxieties, and her ultimate determination. We also see firsthand the toll of her profession, for which she makes imperiled emotional connections, becoming intertwined with the lives of people living through horrific situations. In Love+War, we follow as she becomes involved with a young school teacher who joins the army at the start of the war. She sheds tears as the teacher’s mother welcomes her daughter home, perhaps for the last time. In archival footage from past projects, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, we see the same — Addario forming brief but seemingly significant connections with women, children, and families torn apart by war. All in pursuit of the image. This tension, between the humanity of the subject and the object of the photograph, between empathy and exploitation, is personified tangibly in Addario. She seems always to be striving in two directions at once: toward greater humanity and toward greater art.
Love+War divides its time similarly, attempting to show Addario’s fractured home life in the midst of her constant, stress-stained productivity. In between stints along the Russian front she visits London for her son’s music recital, and we peek behind the curtain at domestic scenes between her and her husband. In candid interviews, Addario, her husband Paul de Bendern, Addario’s mother and three sisters, and past and former colleagues at the New York Times, dissect the interrelations that complicate her line of work, their personal lives complicated in turn. Addario admits that she never intended to marry. It was just too complicated. But her husband was a reporter himself, and so understands the demands, as well as the call to action. Love+War also addresses the gender bias prevalent among photojournalists, which limited Addario’s opportunity while driving her to make the most of them. Her work photographing women and focusing on women’s issues around the world has manifested from this dilemma, being both neglected as a war correspondent in her own right and empathetically drawn to stories many men might not cover.
Vasarhelyi and Chin’s film details several of its subject’s most harrowing stories, including being kidnapped in Libya, but it does so, as much as possible, with actual footage, utilizing interviews only as guide and reference. Through Addario, the film explores the target that has increasingly been placed on journalists amid international conflicts, something more impossible than ever to ignore considering the heinous killings in Palestine of the Academy Award-winning filmmakers behind No Other Land. Love+War is a political film only in the sense that classical photojournalism is inherently political, those politics being a strong emphasis on uncompromised truth, justice, and integrity. In Addario we see these morals in action, albeit in the imperfect form of a authentic, relatable human. Not unlike Alex Honnold, divisive star of Free Solo, Addario represents a particular ideal of the human spirit. It may be an imperfect ideal, as all human ideals are, but its palpable, striving humanity is what ultimately impresses. Love+War captures all of this with singular beauty by representing the shakiness of Addario’s world — our world. It makes study of someone motivated not just to document our profound darkness and depravity, but also always the hope that eludes us. This is the power of the image.
DIRECTORS: Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi & Jimmy Chin; CAST: Lynsey Addario; DISTRIBUTOR: National Geographic Documentary Films; IN THEATERS: October 29; STREAMING: November 7; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 35 min.
Comments are closed.