For more than 40 years, journalist Robert Fisk has reported on some of the most violent and divisive conflicts in the world.

Yung Chang’s This Is Not a Movie captures Fisk in action—feet on the ground, notebook in hand, as he travels into landscapes devastated by war, ferreting out the facts and firing reports back home to reach an audience of millions.

The process of translating raw experience into incisive and passionate dispatches requires the determination to see things first-hand and the tenacity to say what others won’t. In his relentless pursuit of the facts, Fisk has attracted his share of controversy. But in spite of the danger, he has continued to cover stories as they unfold, talking directly to the people involved.

In an era of fake news, when journalists are dubbed “the enemies of the people,” Fisk’s resolve to document reality has become an obsessive war to speak the truth.

For more than 40 years, journalist Robert Fisk has reported on some of the most violent and divisive conflicts in the world: Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and Syria.

Yung Chang’s This Is Not a Movie captures Fisk in action—feet on the ground, notebook in hand, as he travels into landscapes devastated by war, interviewing both combatants and ordinary folk, ferreting out the facts and firing reports back home to reach an audience of millions.

As corporations devour independent media, and language becomes a weapon, another less obvious battle is taking place. In an ever-accelerating 24-hour news cycle, the process of translating raw experience into incisive and passionate dispatches requires the determination to see things first-hand and the tenacity to say what others won’t.

In his relentless pursuit of the facts, Fisk has attracted his share of controversy. But in spite of the danger, he has continued to cover stories as they unfold, talking directly to the people involved, whether that’s Osama bin Laden or a young Palestinian woman whose father was recently murdered. Unlike the glamorous films that fuelled Fisk’s early ambitions, justice rarely prevails, villains aren’t punished, and there are no tidy endings. As Fisk says, “the truth is that this is not a movie.”

Balancing the brutal realities of the job—gun battles, bombings, genocides—with quieter moments—a cup of tea and the paper—Yung Chang has created more than a portrait of a working journalist. The fundamental compassion that drives Fisk and his fellow correspondents is necessary to unearth the heart of a story. Get the story, tell it straight, and no matter the situation, report on the side of those who suffer.

In an era of fake news, when journalists are dubbed “the enemies of the people,” Fisk’s determination to challenge the centres of power, to witness reality on the ground in real time, has become an obsessive war to speak the truth.

For more than 40 years, journalist Robert Fisk has reported on some of the most violent and divisive conflicts in the world. Director Yung Chang captures Fisk in relentless action—feet on the ground, notebook in hand, as he travels into landscapes devastated by war, ferreting out the facts and firing reports back home to reach an audience of millions.

Before embarking on this film I asked myself, “Why do I want to make a film about Robert Fisk, a British journalist who covers the Middle East?” I was weary of giving a platform to someone who hasn’t had to fight for one (as a privileged, “older, white male”) without giving voice to someone else who could benefit from being given such a spotlight. But after an initial research trip with Fisk in Beirut, I realized this film wasn’t just about Robert Fisk, it’s about reconsidering how journalism fits into today’s saturated and abbreviated news cycle. It’s about the importance of media literacy. It’s about pursuing “truth” and how each journalist interprets that word for the rest of us. This is a film about ideas, propelled relentlessly through Fisk, but it isn’t a biography. I want the audience to engage with Fisk, to question him, to criticize him. Known by many to be abrasive, Fisk has a higher mission in the pursuit of truth than being likeable — and they are often our canaries in the coal mine.

In the beginning of this trip Fisk took me on a ‘tour’ of Beirut – and with Fisk, you can’t walk through a city like Beirut without feeling as if you are walking through time, past and present fused into one. It was during this walk, Fisk would point out in vivid detail where he witnessed massacres, assassinations, and war. This back-and-forth from past to present became the foundation for the movie. I realized that to make this movie, we needed to just follow Fisk, whether at home or away reporting, and that everything we needed to make a film about journalism, could be told provocatively through his experience.

This Is Not a Movie is a film about a foreign correspondent who has dedicated his life and work to a region that has often been misrepresented. Fisk has worked to bring the rest of the world the news he didn’t feel was being seen.

I hope that as a Chinese-Canadian filmmaker, my perspective and craft brings an approach that isn’t rooted in a white, colonial perspective. I’ve made sure to surround myself with a diverse team and key teammates who are insiders of the region, including producer Nelofer Pazira (Afghan-Canadian director, actress, journalist and star of Mohsen Makmalbaf’s Kandahar), Duraid Munajim, an award-winning Iraqi-Canadian cinematographer, and our Israeli-Canadian composer, Ohad Benchetrit and co-composer Justin Small. In addition, editor Mike Munn (Stories We Tell), producers Allyson Luchak (The Staircase), Ingmar Trost (Solitary), and Anita Lee (Stories We Tell) were instrumental in helping me make this film come to life.

I believe we’ve created a film that will test the audience’s own beliefs of journalism, the subjectivity of truth, our complicity in war, and what, if any, is the relevance of the written word in the changing face of media consumption.

Robert Fisk is “the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain,” according to The New York Times. He is the Middle East correspondent of the London Independent and has won more than 20 major British and international journalism awards for his reporting from the region. He is the author of several bestselling books, including Pity the Nation, an eyewitness account of the Lebanese Civil War, and the historical volume The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. In 2006, he was awarded the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Prize for Cultural Freedom from the Lannan Foundation.

First for The Times of London and then for The Independent, Fisk has been reporting from the Middle East for nearly 40 years, covering everything from the Lebanese Civil War in the 1980s to the Israeli invasions of Lebanon. He was among the first Western journalists to report the massacre at the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. He also witnessed and reported from the Iranian Revolution (1979), the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (1979), the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), the Algerian Civil War (1990–1998), the US-Iraqi Gulf War (1991), the Bosnian and Kosovo conflicts (1992–1995, 1998), the American attack on Afghanistan (2001), and the US invasion of Iraq (2003). He covered many of the 2011 Arab revolutions, especially Egypt, and is today reporting from the civil war in Syria.

He is the only journalist to have interviewed Osama bin Laden three times—first in Sudan and then in Al-Qaeda’s secret camps in Afghanistan.

Born in England in 1946, Fisk holds a BA in English and Linguistics from Lancaster University in the UK, and a PhD in Politics from Trinity College, University of Dublin. He has received 17 honorary doctorates from British, Canadian, and other universities. He is a frequent broadcaster and lecturer around the world.

Fisk is the author of five books, including two works on Irish history, one of them an account of Irish neutrality in the Second World War; it remains a bestseller. Outside of the Middle East, Fisk has written and lectured extensively on the First and Second World Wars. He was the first Englishman to be invited to give a lecture to the families of Irish Catholics killed by British soldiers on Bloody Sunday.

He remains based in Beirut as The Independent’s Middle East correspondent and is currently working on a new history of the region called Night of Power.