The Roads Most Traveled: Photojournalist Don Bartletti
2020 · 25m · United States
Directed by Bill Wisneski
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Pulitzer-winning photojournalist Don Bartletti shares heart-wrenching stories from forty years documenting migration and history as it unfolds.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A reverent portrait of a Pulitzer winner doing exactly what you'd expect a Pulitzer winner to do—noble, sure, but where's the mess, the contradiction, the thing that makes you uncomfortable about heroism?
Wisneski constructs a formal elegance around Bartletti's archive, letting photographs and testimony build a measured argument about witnessing itself; the film knows its place in the documentary canon and argues it carefully.
The decision to let Bartletti's own images carry the narrative weight—rather than overlay them—forces the viewer into the rhythm of his eye, and that restraint is what transforms forty years of work into something immediate and unbearable.