In "War Photographer", a group of Indonesian thugs chased and killed a person of a different faction. Photographer Nachtway knelt down and begged the protectors to let the innocent man go, but the thugs still cut the poor man's throat. As the thugs raised their knives, Nachtway also raised the camera lens. It has been commented that Nachtway here embodies all the virtues of a journalist: conscience before and calm and professionalism after.
In other words, the profession of a journalist is a bit heartless—your death, my reporting, his misfortune, my reporting. However, there are still many so-called heartless professions in this world, especially on the eve of dawn when people are unpredictable, wind and rain are precarious, and black and white are reversed.
The film "Eavesdropping Storm" (also known as "Other People's Lives") seems to give us such a model, a secret policeman of the National Security Bureau can cover up "reactionary" state enemies because of "discovery of conscience".
Secret police HG XX/7 could have been an excellent surveillance expert, but one special surveillance operation was enough to turn his life around.
The ultimate reason for the failure is that he walked into the life of the monitored person, was moved by the spirit and even the life of the other party, and turned from a bystander to a participant. There are several notable signs: he walked into the monitored person's home many times, Trying to integrate into the home; he talks to the hostess in the bar, persuades the heroine not to betray her husband, sells the body for the sake of art, HG XX/7 gives his point of view to the events that were originally progressing objectively; he reports to his superiors, hoping that he Listening alone, I hope to monopolize the right to speak, and make myself the information controller of the entire operation, and all this is to change the direction of history.
Of course, the consequence of doing so is to ruin his own future step by step. When the article of the right-wing writer who was monitored was successfully published in the West German "Der Spiegel" weekly, the general secretary of East Germany was furious, and the bureaucracy's shirk of responsibility quickly made him It became a scapegoat, so that on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, HG XX/7 was still doing the mechanical work of opening letters in the letter monitoring room of the National Security Bureau - waiting for inspection.
When the Berlin Wall was in place, people in the GDR always thought of the Federal Republic of Germany in the west, thinking that their country was not democratic, and that only Germany on the other side of the wall was the real Germany.
But what happens when the wall does come down?
Maybe we can recall the dialogue between the former East German art minister and right-wing writer Greyman at the end of the film: "You can write whatever you want now, isn't this the country of your dreams? But Greyman, the current Federal Republic of Germany is really Is it what you artists want? Is there anything else to write? People have no faith and no love, it's a free federal republic, but does it make sense?" ...
at the end of the story, the good guys HG XX/7 doing An ordinary newspaper delivery man drags a small car from street to street every day, leaving pieces of newsprint in each newspaper box, that's all, or, when he passes by a bookstore one day, Found the photo of the familiar figure and the "Praise of the Good Man" "For Myself" on the new bookshelf.
Betrayal of a career is not something everyone can do, and choosing a conscience is not as easy as one thinks.
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