Reliving connections with an ‘Oscars’ hero

CHINA
East Daily

Former China Daily journalists catch up with Boston Globe colleagues who found fame with Spotlight.

“Spotlight”, the movie named after the Boston Globe’s Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative team that in the early 2000’s wrote an explosive series on child sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church and its attendant cover-up, was a surprise winner at this year’s Academy Awards. But that was not the only surprise.

Who could imagine that a story about shoe leather journalism, about the drudgery of digging for facts and knocking on doors, about the tedium of finding and poring over thousands of documents, could be depicted with such authenticity and yet be such an immersive and moving experience?

Certainly not the members of the Spotlight Team, who, when approached by the filmmakers, wondered how a film could be made about a decidedly unglamorous process. “It would be like a film about how sausage is made”, Walter “Robby” Robinson, the then head of the Spotlight Team, recalled recently.

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