Searching For Gerda Taro
The Fifth Estate
•
57m
Directed by Camille Ménager • Documentary • 2021 • 58 minutes
SEARCHING FOR GERDA TARO celebrates the life and work of Taro — a charismatic Jewish refugee from Germany, an anti-fascist, and a trailblazing photographer whose work would be forgotten for decades.
In 1935, Taro (then going by her birth name, Gerta Pohorylle), met Endre Friedmann, a Jewish photographer from Hungary trying to make a name for himself in Paris. They fell in love and moved in together. The next year, they changed their names to Gerda Taro and Robert Capa. Capa taught Taro photography. Taro in turn helped sell his photos and build his reputation. Together, they went to Spain to report on the civil war from the front lines, a war she would cover for only a year before she herself would die — the first female war photographer to be killed on assignment.
SEARCHING FOR GERDA TARO shares dozens of stunning archival images by and of Taro. We come to understand her life and work through conversations with curators, authors, and descendants of those who knew her. For decades, her legacy was wrapped up with Capa’s, many of her photos seemingly lost. But with the discovery of thousands of her negatives in the mid-1990s, Taro can finally enjoy the credit she deserves as a brilliant photographer in her own right.
Up Next in The Fifth Estate
-
Sex, Lies and Tabloids!
Directed by Jean-Baptiste Peretie • Documentary • 2015 • 52 minutes
They're lurid, obnoxious, disdainful and explicit. And we love them - and love to hate them. SEX, LIES AND TABLOIDS! charts the rise and fall of tabloid papers in the UK and US, including the New York Post, The Sun, and notoriou...
-
Sound of Torture
Directed by Keren Shayo • Documentary • 2013 • 58 minutes
Since 2006 when Europe closed its borders, human trafficking has burgeoned in Egypt’s Sinai Desert, where Eritrean asylum seekers and refugees heading north to Israel are kidnapped, held hostage, and tortured by Bedouin smugglers demandin...
-
Spark
Directed by Hu Jie • Documentary • 2019 • 114 minutes
SPARK opens by the side of a road in Lanzhou City, northwestern China, as trucks rumble through a blasted hillside. An elderly man walks along the dusty road and pauses to point to a nearby spot—the former execution grounds. “They executed ma...