This year’s Sundance featured firsthand accounts of human rights violations in Darfur (Reporter), Tibet (Tibet in Song) and Burma (Burma VJ), so what does it say about me that the documentary that reduced me to a burbling mess was The Cove, a white-knuckle critique of dolphin killing in Japan? The truth is, it may actually reveal less about me than it does the tactics by which the films position their respective causes for audiences — one of the many subjects director Eric Daniel Metzgar contemplates with Reporter.
In his philosophically introspective doc, Metzgar accompanies New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on his ventures through Africa, deconstructing the methods he uses to convey the atrocities he witnesses there back to his readers in the West (a heavy burden, considering that his writing has the power — or the potential, at least — to influence world leaders). It was Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, who helped alert the world to the fact that there was a genocide occurring in Darfur.
Metzgar approaches Kristof’s reporting with a healthy skepticism, just as all moviegoers would be advised to handle agenda-driven docs (he explains why victims can be unreliable, causes can obscure logical reasoning and so on). Incorporating himself in the process from the very beginning, Metzgar quotes Kristof’s mission as “to make you care about what’s just over the hill,” raising red flags as the journalist seeks out worst-case atrocities to write about everywhere he goes. In a Congolese camp, Kristof passes over horror stories deemed not depressing enough before training his attention on a withered 41-year-old woman, Yohanita, who was raped by soldiers, saw her fields pillaged and now teeters on the brink of death.
The Sundance Film Festival had it’s first major deal go down Saturday night as young distributor Senator Entertainment (in a co-venture with Sony Pictures Worldwide) picked up North American rights to Antoine Fuqua’s admittedly unfinished 
