Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow joins Oscar nominated producers/directors Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing (Jesus Camp) to shine the spotlight on journalists in the new documentary film, Endangered, which just released an official trailer. Debuting on HBO on June 28, 2022, Endangered focuses on four journalists over the course of a year as they struggle to report the truth in a hostile environment.
“When I started working with HBO, one of the first and most urgent ideas I talked about with the documentary team there was chronicling the minefield of misinformation, anti-press authoritarian politics, and faltering media business models that reporters around the world navigate to bring us the truth. In following a remarkable group of journalists into chaos and back, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady have brought that story to electric life and given us an important record of this moment in history,” explained Farrow.
“Many of us living in democratic nations take freedom of the press for granted,” said directors Grady and Ewing. “In the course of making this film, though, we realized that in order to survive, this ‘right’ has to be fought for in perpetuity. As governments and the public become increasingly hostile to ‘The Media,’ it was a privilege to observe a few of the unassuming beat reporters who hit the streets every day to bring us the facts.”
The featured journalists are reporter Patrícia Campos Mello (Folha de São Paulo), reporter Oliver Laughland (The Guardian), photojournalist Carl Juste (Miami Herald), and photojournalist Sáshenka Gutiérrez (EFE News Agency).
HBO’s official Endangered synopsis:
“Endangered chronicles a year in the life of four journalists living and working in democratic countries where freedom of the press has historically been considered a ‘given.’ Yet, as online misinformation proliferates and world leaders brazenly denigrate the press, distrust of traditional media is on the rise, and journalists are increasingly facing situations more typically encountered in war zones or autocratic states.
Cutting back and forth between unfolding stories in Mexico City, São Paulo, Brazil, and the United States, Endangered introduces us to Sáshenka, Patrícia, Oliver, and Carl whose safety and professions are under threat as they cover political rallies, police brutality, BLM protests and the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, while confronting slander, hostility, and violence from their own governments. As newsrooms across the world face economic hardships and layoffs, conventional checks and balances against corrupt institutions of power are weakening; journalists are at the forefront of a dangerous culture war with the very right to free speech at the crux of it.
Meanwhile, the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is normally tasked with helping journalists in peril abroad, is for the first time inundated with pleas for help and safety training here in the United States. Endangered is an urgent and dynamic chronicle of the fourth estate whose traditions and standards are under immediate and deliberate attack.”
