When Craig Renaud’s big brother and collaborator in covering years of wars and humanitarian crises Brent Renaud was killed by Russian forces firing on his vehicle in the first weeks of the war in Ukraine, he was thrown into a world of horrible loss and uncertainty.
One thing was clear, though. He needed to keep filming. His brother would’ve expected nothing else.
“It was a conversation we had a lot. What would we do if somebody was killed? And it was a promise to each other that we would keep filming and telling the story,” Oscar nominee Craig Renaud said in an interview. “We have been covering this for almost 20 years in wars with other people. Why would it be any different when it happens to one of us?”
The result, three years later, was “Armed Only With a Camera: The Life and Death of Brent Renaud” and an Academy Award nomination for best documentary short film. It’s brought mixed feelings for Craig Renaud and his producer and collaborator on the film Juan Arredondo, a photographer seriously wounded in the attack who was working with Brent Renaud on a project about refugees for Time Studios.
“I don’t think this is the documentary that we wanted to be celebrated for,” Arredondo said. “I don’t think I ever dreamed of doing a documentary about my friend dying.”
An unsparing look at death’s reality
Craig Renaud said he has lingering survivor’s guilt for not being at his brother’s side, and Arredondo, who desperately tried to keep Brent Renaud alive after they were shot, has more than enough of his own.
“It is unbelievably incredible to be able to honor him like this and have him immortalized and his name being in the name of the film and have people be talking about him at this level,” Renaud said. But, he added, “every time we have a screening, we are reliving that trauma.”
The film unsparingly shows Brent Renaud’s dead body. We see it covered with a jacket in the immediate aftermath attack, and later in a coffin being sealed to ship back to the brothers’ Arkansas home. We see his brother filming him up close, showing the war scars on the lifeless face, and explaining why he needs to.
And we see the deeply emotional meeting in a Ukraine hospital between Craig Renaud and Arredondo, who would need 13 surgeries and two years of physical therapy to recover.
“I miss my friend,” Arredondo says through tears. “I miss him too,” Renaud says.
“The gift of this film,” Arredondo told the AP four years after that moment, “is to heal in some way, to give closure to some of those questions that I had.”
A warm look at a life’s work
Despite its inevitable darkness, most of the film’s 37 minutes celebrate the life’s work of its subject, who won a Peabody and several other awards for his reporting with his brother before his death at 50. It opens quietly, with him thoughtfully and sympathetically interviewing a teen migrant from Honduras on his journey to the U.S. Another key scene comes at a hospital crowded with wounded people in Somalia, where a patient summons Brent to him.
“You are very honest and faithful, the way you hold that camera,” the man says. “It is not just (that) you’re just holding it, you are doing it from your heart.”
Craig Renaud says he hesitates to tell the story behind that clip because people will think he made it up.
“Brent came to me in a dream and was like, ‘You missed the right footage,'” he said. “I went back and I kept digging. And I found that moment. And to this day, that is my favorite moment of the film. I mean, when I first discovered it and watched it, I just had chills all over my body.”
Ukraine, war and the Oscars
The Russia-Ukraine war has loomed large among Oscar documentaries.
“20 Days in Mariupol” from The Associated Press won best documentary feature in 2024. Last year, “Porcelain War,” about Ukrainian artists in the war, was a nominee. This year’s feature category includes “Mr. Nobody Against Putin,” in which a teacher pushes back against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s control of information in Russia during the war.
The glitter of awards season has stayed secondary to the work Renaud and Arredondo have returned to. Renaud spoke to the AP from Panama. Arredondo was on assignment in Colombia, where he was raised. He was summoned by the New York Times when he was at the Oscar nominees luncheon, in a ballroom where he was being feted alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Timothée Chalamet.
“I strongly believe that what we do matters,” Arredondo said. “I think what happened to us, helped me think that this is my purpose and this is why I survived. I have to continue to do it.”
