Pédra. A Reporter Without Borders (2006)

The photographer Jean-Pierre Pedrazzini was born in Paris in 1927, to parents from Locarno. Emigrating with his parents to Switzerland in 1943, he starts taking photographs in Davos. By the end of the war, he is taking up a job offer with Paris Match, and beginning his short career as a photojournalist. Little more than a decade later, while capturing enduring images of the Budapest uprising of 1956, he is fatally injured. I meet people who shared his reportage, trips and adventures: photographers Russ Melcher, Willy Rizzo, Franz Goess, Benno Graziani and Erich Lessing. And I speak to his colleague Mario De Biasi, present in 1956 on Republic Square in Budapest when Jean-Pierre Pedrazzini falls under a hail of bullets on the Battle of the AVO headquarters. I visit Dominique Lapierre, too, with whom Jean-Pierre Pedrazzini published a book about the trip that they did through the USSR in early 1956, accompanied by their wives: at that time a first. In Tbilisi I meet the surgeon Georgi Mossechvili who hosted the two French couples during their trip. The film broadens our perspective on Pedrazzini's work, exploring not only drama of the famous Budapest pictures, but the full scope of his earlier work which led him there.