BETC Paris does justice to Reporters Sans Frontières
It’s easy to get depressed about the state of the world: cruel, controlling and anti-democratic regimes – and that’s just in good old Europe. We won’t go into jihadis and mad North Korean dictators or we’d give up on the notion of civilised progress entirely.
One group of people we do depend on to bring us a (relatively) unvarnished view of the world are the reporters who risk their lives to tell us what’s going on in the world’s trouble spots. Once these were the famed photo-journalists of whom the most famous was probably Robert Capa, who operated in the Spanish Civil War, World War Two and Korea. Capa, a founder of the Magnum photo agency, was killed in what was then Indo-China in 1954, accompanying French troops fighting the Vietnamese.
Reporters Sans Frontières is one of those fantastic French institutions, like Médecins Sans Frontières, which helps to keep liberté, égalité, fraternité alive. Although these haven’t always been the watchwords of French governments, instanced by the Indo-China war among many others. Anyway, Reporters Sans Frontières is bringing out a book to celebrate Capa and other intrepid journalists and accompanying that with an online film from BETC Paris showing the enthusiasm of our ‘leaders’ for military excess and the dire consequences suffered by the victims of war.
Like most things from BETC Paris, the agency is completely unfazed by the task in hand: in this case it’s truly serious stuff but there’s a lovely bit (above) with two pretty Chinese soldiers giggling away as they watch a parade of lethal Chinese armaments. You’re charmed and appalled at the same time.
MAA creative scale: 7.
PS: Here’s one of Capa’s D-Day pics. Think it’s tough working on a Mac?