Factory sealed DVD</br></br>Product Description</br></br>Some of the world’s most dangerous places are not declared warzones, but cities or regions where drug trafficking, ethnic tensions, poverty, gang violence and political corruption have combined to create the most violent hotspots on Earth.  In these areas, the situation is often so volatile that major news organizations have left, or dare not to go at all.  Only a handful of photojournalists remain, armed with just their cameras, to document the horrors and attempt to make sense of complicated factors that perpetuate the conflicts.  Witness, a four-part series executive produced by filmmaker Michael Mann and director David Frankham, follows three combat photographers into conflict zones in Mexico, Libya, South Sudan and Brazil.  In following these photojournalists, their relations with the people on the ground and their closeness in battle, Witness shows how, even when everyone else seeks cover, the war photographer stands.</br></br>Amazon.com</br></br>Making a documentary about photojournalists is no simple task--film is a kinetic medium, of course, while photography is not, and few viewers are likely to relish watching a parade of still shots. But with <i>Witness</i>, executive producer Michael Mann and the others involved have avoided that potential pitfall by focusing not so much on actual photos (although there are plenty of them) as on the men and women who take them, and what they go through to do it. For the three seen here, the job isn't merely dangerous, it's potentially fatal. The fancifully named Eros Hoagland, whose photog dad was killed while on assignment in El Salvador, goes first to Juarez, Mexico, where the drug war rages and the good guys are definitely not winning (an estimated 40 percent of "legitimate" businesses have closed, while drug-running street gangs number in the hundreds); Hoagland also travels to Rio de Janeiro, where authorities are waging an uphill battle against crime before the World Cup arrives in 2014 and the Olympics two years later. Michael Christopher Brown is in Libya, "the craziest country on Earth," during the uprising that leads to the capture and execution of Muammar Gaddafi; Brown is shot, and two of his colleagues are killed. French photojournalist Veronique de Viguerie, who has already been to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other hot spots, is filmed in Southern Sudan, where groups of farmers-turned-fighters known as "Arrow Boys" are battling dictator Joseph Kony and his murderous "Lord's Resistance Army." What could possibly motivate these people to take such risks? "I'm there to show you what I saw, what happened to me," says Hoagland, while de Viguerie, who's pregnant, clearly has an emotional investment in the fate of the people whose struggle she is chronicling. Meanwhile, the filmmakers, who surely took some serious chances themselves, have done an artful (by way of music and virtuoso camera techniques) and compelling job of depicting what surely must be one of the most harrowing gigs any sane person could choose. <i>--Sam Graham</i></br><br/>http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00AHFWIBM