When Brent Renaud, an award-winning American filmmaker and journalist, was killed in Ukraine on Sunday, he was there to do what he had completed all through his profession: bear witness to the world’s most harmful tales.
On the time of his dying Mr. Renaud was on project for Time Studios engaged on a “challenge targeted on the worldwide refugee disaster,” in line with an announcement from Time executives.
Via his intensive movie catalog, Mr. Renaud highlighted the human affect of conflict and battle, mentioned Vivian Schiller, who commissioned Mr. Renaud’s 2004 documentary sequence concerning the Iraq conflict for The New York Occasions and Discovery Channel.
“He was only a filmmaker with super coronary heart,” Ms. Schiller mentioned on Sunday. “It actually kind of pervaded all of his work.”
Mr. Renaud, 50, typically collaborated along with his brother, Craig, to provide movie and tv tasks for The Occasions, HBO, NBC, Vice Media and different corporations. He filmed in battle zones and dangerous areas, together with components of Afghanistan, Haiti, Iraq, Mexico and Ukraine.
One in every of his earliest tasks was “Off to Battle,” an intimate 2004 documentary sequence he created along with his brother. Over six months in Arkansas after which a 12 months in Iraq, the brothers adopted a gaggle of Arkansas Nationwide Guardsmen from the coaching floor to the battlefields.
The sequence was private for the brothers as a result of they too have been from Arkansas. The movie targeted as a lot on the households ripped aside by conflict because it did on fight struggles. At one level, after a number of troopers had died, a unit chief advised that the brothers go residence, Mr. Renaud mentioned in a 2009 interview with Curator Journal.
“It wasn’t a consideration for us — the hazard was not a problem, and the story was not full,” he mentioned.
The sequence marked the beginning of Mr. Renaud’s intrepid, globe-trotting profession. He and his brother took their cameras all over the world, from Black Lives Matter protests in Little Rock, Ark., to the 2008 Beijing Paralympic Video games.
In a 2015 documentary for The Occasions, Mr. Renaud scaled barbed wire fences and waded via rivers to movie baby migrants fleeing Central America for america.
The brothers survived a number of near-death conditions, together with automotive crashes, blasts from improvised explosive gadgets and assaults from members of the Egyptian navy, they mentioned in a 2013 interview with Filmmaker Journal.
The Renauds discovered to journey with little tools, generally solely utilizing a cellphone digital camera in the event that they wanted to be discreet, they mentioned. Shortly after Mr. Renaud completed faculty, he mentioned he traveled to Cambodia with a small digital camera that he “barely knew how one can use.”
“I in some way managed to be taken severely and landed an interview with one of many prime operational generals of the co-prime minister,” he mentioned.
The brothers received a number of awards, together with a 2012 duPont-Columbia College Award for the 11-minute movie “Surviving Haiti’s Earthquake: Kids,” and a 2014 Peabody Award for “Final Probability Excessive,” a sequence about Chicago college students with emotional problems.
Mr. Renaud was a fellow on the Nieman Basis for Journalism at Harvard College from 2018 to 2019.
Mr. Renaud’s closing project on Sunday was capturing refugees fleeing throughout bridges in Irpin, in line with his reporting associate, Juan Arredondo, who described the occasions in a video posted on the Okhmatdyt hospital’s Instagram web page. As at all times, he was attempting to seize the human toll of a geopolitical battle.
“We don’t search out the damaging assignments,” Mr. Renaud advised Curator Journal in 2009. “However as soon as we’re dedicated to a narrative, we’re keen to do no matter it takes to inform that story.”