In the summer, my friend Jess Search died after a short and vicious illness. She made documentaries, but people always eschewed words such as “producer” or “exec” when describing her, in favour of “powerhouse” and “force of nature”, and that was even before she started dying. Like anyone with a genuinely fun spirit, she also had an incredibly serious mind, and was knee-deep in trying to fix a lot of things, from the climate crisis to corruption, not just by film-making but through a galvanising quality she had. I felt a lot less hopeful about everything after she died, but it was a film she had made that gave me optimism again, if only about one thing.
While We Watched is a documentary about the Indian broadcast journalist Ravish Kumar, and it slotted into a body of her work – in film-making and in activism – that defended anyone who makes it harder for the powerful to lie. She was the first person I knew who recognised the danger of Slapp lawsuits, and started trying to build a fund for the journalist Carole Cadwalladr and others like her, who would, inevitably, be chased through the courts by people much richer than themselves. That asymmetry of wealth continues to have a devastating effect on investigative journalism.
