LOS ANGELES – When Brent Renaud, Craig Renaud’s older brother and colleague in covering years of wars and humanitarian crises, was killed when Russian forces fired on his vehicle in the first weeks of the war in Ukraine, he was thrown into a world of terrible loss and uncertainty.
However, one thing was clear. He needed to continue filming. His brother had no other expectations.
“It was a conversation we had a lot of. What would we do if someone got killed? And it was a promise to each other that we would keep making the film and keep telling the story,” said Oscar nominee Craig Renaud in an interview with The Associated Press. “We’ve been covering this for almost 20 years in wars with other people. Why would it be any different when it happens to one of us?”
The result, three years later, was “Armed Only with a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud” and an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Short Film. It brought mixed emotions for Craig Renaud and his producer and collaborator on the film Juan Arredondo, a photographer seriously injured in the attack who was working with Brent Renaud on a project about refugees for Time Studios.
“I don’t think this is the documentary we wanted to celebrate,” Arredondo said. “I don’t think I ever dreamed of making a documentary on my friend’s death.”
Craig Renaud said he has survivor’s guilt for not being by his brother’s side, and Arredondo, who tried desperately to keep Brent Renaud alive after he was shot, has plenty of it herself.
“To honor him like this and immortalize him and have his name in the name of the film and have people talking about him on this level, it’s incredible,” Renaud said. But, she added, “Every time we have a screening, we’re reliving that trauma.”
The film shamelessly depicts the dead body of Brent Renaud. We see that it was covered with a jacket immediately after the attack, and it was later sealed in a coffin to be shipped back to the brothers’ Arkansas home. We see her brother filming her from close up, showing the battle scars on her lifeless face, and explaining why he needs it.
And we see a deeply emotional meeting between Craig Renaud and Arredondo in a hospital in Ukraine, who will require 13 surgeries and two years of physical therapy to recover.
“I miss my friend,” Arredondo says through tears. “I miss him too,” says Renaud.
“The gift of this film,” Arredondo explained four years after that moment, “is to somehow heal, to eliminate some of those questions that I had.”
Despite its inevitable darkness, most of the film’s 37 minutes celebrate the life’s work of its subject, who won a Peabody and several other awards for his reporting with his brother at the age of 50. It begins quietly, in which he thoughtfully and sympathetically interviews a teenage migrant visiting the US from Honduras. The second key scene takes place in a hospital full of injured people in Somalia, where a patient calls Brent to him.
The man says, “The way you hold the camera, you’re so honest and loyal.” “It’s not that you’re just holding it, you’re doing it with your heart.”
Craig Renaud says he’s hesitant to tell the story behind that clip because people will think he made it up.
“Brent came to me in a dream and said, ‘You missed the perfect footage,'” he said. “I went back and kept digging. And I found that moment. And to this day, that’s my favorite moment in the movie. I mean, when I first found it and saw it, I felt chills all over my body.”
The Russia-Ukraine war looms large among Oscar documentaries.
The Associated Press’s “20 Days in Mariupol” won best documentary feature in 2024. Last year, “Porcelain War,” about Ukrainian artists at war, was nominated. This year’s feature category includes “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” in which a teacher pushes back against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s control over information in Russia during the war.
The glamor of awards season has paled in comparison to the work to which Renaud and Arredondo have returned. Renaud spoke from Panama. Arredondo was on assignment in Colombia, where he was raised. While he was at the Oscar nominees luncheon, he was invited by The New York Times into a ballroom, where he was being welcomed with Leonardo DiCaprio and Timothée Chalamet.
“I firmly believe that what we do matters,” Arredondo said. “I think what happened to us helped me think that this is my purpose and that’s why I survived. I have to keep going.”
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