By Andrew Cawthorne
NAIROBI (Reuters) - The Kenyan cameraman whose footage of starving Ethiopians in 1984 provoked the most famous global aid response in history has been honoured in a documentary to go on public release next month.
"Mo & Me" tracks the extraordinary life of journalist Mohamed Amin from his first big scoop uncovering Soviet military activity in Zanzibar to his death arguing with hijackers as their plane plunged into the sea off the Comoros islands.
"It’s my journey back into his life -- the man I idolised but hardly knew," said his son Salim Amin, 35.
He narrates the 95-minute film interspersed with his father’s footage of some of the most momentous events in east Africa’s last half century.
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The documentary has already picked up an award in Los Angeles for best international documentary.
It goes to another film festival in New York on May 9, then premieres to the public in Amin’s birthplace Nairobi on May 17.
Amin is best known round the world for his apocalyptic pictures of tens of thousands of hungry and dying Ethiopians huddled together on the cold plains of Korem two decades’ ago.
His close-ups of the victims’ expressions and eyes remain among the most moving images of the 20th century.
Broadcast on the BBC to narration by Michael Buerk, the footage shocked the world and eventually inspired the "Live Aid" concerts and aid movement fronted by Irish rocker Bob Geldorf.
"In his life, as in his death, my father was determined to show the world things that some were afraid to see and others wished they could ignore," Salim Amin said.
IDI AMIN IMAGES
A joint production between Al Jazeera International and the firm Salim Amin inherited from his father -- Camerapix -- "Mo & Me" is directed by Roger Mills who helped make the series "Around the World in 80 Days".
In the film, the dramatic twists in Mohamed Amin’s life vie for attention with the turmoil of late 20th century Africa.
Born into a poor Kenyan family who had arrived from India to help build railways under the British colony, Amin started work in Tanzania and suffered 28 days’ jail and torture for his first story on Soviet influence in the Zanzibar islands.
A workaholic -- and a tetchy and domineering one at that -- Amin was back on the job just two hours after marrying, abandoned his family for long periods, and kept his eager son behind a desk rather than let him go out into the field.
He was famous for wielding a clutch of different cameras, stills and video, at the same time.
Even after losing his arm in an explosion in Ethiopia in 1991, Amin carried on filming with an artificial limb.
And when he died on a plane that was hijacked after leaving Addis Ababa and crash-landed in the sea off the Comoros after running out of fuel in 1996, survivors say he was negotiating and arguing with the hijackers up until the end.
Despite the heroics of his life, however, many in the film Salim Amin calls a "warts and all" portrait recall him as sometimes cantankerous and so mean he would include on his expenses claim to London the postage stamp for sending it in.
"While he was a great man and did more for this continent in terms of journalism than anybody in history, like anyone he had flaws," Salim Amin told Reuters at a private screening.
Other great scoops by Mohamed Amin, who included Reuters among his various employers, included images of the death-throes of assassinated Kenyan trade unionist and politician Tom Mboya in 1969.
And his friendship with Uganda’s Idi Amin led to some remarkable images of the quirky dictator and his bloody rule. One shot shows Idi Amin held aloft on a dais by ex-patriates in Kampala, while others capture his victims’ executions.
