The film She Said (2022) is a successful adaptation of the book of the same name. It is not only useful to all aspiring journalists; it shows a complex profession and bruised destinies, while keeping a gentle and slow approach.
A very important film was released a few months ago, in October 2022: it’s called She Said. It is inspired by the true story of two New York Times journalists, Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey, who exposed the Weinstein scandal in 2017. The case helped initiate the well-known #MeToo movement.
This article is taken from the chronicle that Numerama gives each week at the end of the show Le Meilleur des Mondes on France Culture, Friday at 9 p.m. You can find all of our chronicles here, or on YouTube.
She Said, it is the adaptation by director Maria Schrader of the book of the same name, in which the two women recount the stages of their colossal work. This is a work necessary for the exercise of journalism, and I weigh my words. We learn method, rigor and empathy: three axes that we find in the feature film.
In the trailer, one is heard asking the other how to get the victims to agree to talk to her. The other relays to her one of the arguments she often gives: I’m not going to change what happened to you, but together, maybe we can make sure other people are protected. The truth is all. »
This last sentence, also present in the book, marked me a lot. This is a basic yet essential lesson when speaking with victims. Behind every story, there are humans, and it is only through them and them that we manage to reveal cases.
She Said shows that for months, Kantor and Twhoey suffered numerous refusals, sometimes hard to take, without being overwhelmed by frustration. The strength of Maria Schrader’s film resides in this sorority that one feels is tied together over the course of the investigation, between the journalists first, but also with their many female sources.
We see how the Weinstein affair surreptitiously inserts itself into the intimate lives of the two mothers, spills over into their private lives and makes them understand the systemic magnitude of the subject they are tackling.
There are other films which have managed to represent this humility necessary for the work of a journalist. I think about spotlight in 2015, adaptation of the investigation by Boston Globe reporters, who made public a pedophilia scandal in the Catholic Church. We already felt this slowness, even this softness in the way of depicting the relations between reporters and victims.
She Said is available in France on VOD (purchase or rental) on several platforms, such as YouTube or Canal.
The chronicle of Numerama in Brave New World, every Friday on France Culture
The program of April 28, 2023 focused on OSINT in journalism: to listen to it again, it’s here. Find the chronicle of Numerama around 55 minutes after the start of the show, like every week.
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