Year: 2003
Language: English
Runtime: 82 min
Director: Peter Raymont
Producer: Linda Tracey, Peter Raymont, Harold Crooks, Claude Bonin
Executive Producer: Éric Michel
Writer: Peter Raymont, Harold Crooks
Cinematographer: John Westheuser
Editor: Michael Fuller
Sound: Peter Sawade
Music: Rob Carli
Production Company: National Film Board of Canada

Peter Raymont and Harold Crooks’s acclaimed 1987 documentary The World Is Watching investigates the role journalists played in the U.S.-financed Contra war against Nicaragua’s revolutionary Sandinista government, and analyzes the precarious decision-making process that determined how the situation would be represented on the nightly news. In 2002, Raymont and Crooks returned to Nicaragua to discover what had become of a nation no longer considered a priority by the world’s media. The results are captured in The World Stopped Watching.

Accompanied by legendary Newsweek photographer Bill Gentile and acclaimed Boston Globe columnist Randolph Ryan – who also participated in The World Is Watching – the filmmakers travel through the impoverished streets and fields of Nicaragua. Not only has there been some reconciliation among the former Sandinista and Contra fighters but, for the first time in Latin American history, a former president has been jailed for corruption. The World Stopped Watching was nominated for a Directors Guild of Canada Award and won the Genie Award for Best Direction in a Documentary Programme.

By: Andrew McIntosh