Anna Politkovskaya emerges in Words of War as a reporter defined less by front‑line spectacle than by the faces she meets. Tasked by Novaya Gazeta to serve as a “people correspondent,” she trades bullet‑ridden press tents for small Chechen villages, where whispered testimonies carry the weight of unspoken horrors. The film follows her path from Grozny in 1999 through that fatal October day in 2006, when her pursuit of truth met a bullet.

Against a backdrop of escalating state control, Politkovskaya’s dispatches confront the Russian military’s tactics in Chechnya—torture cells, mass graves, burned‑out homes—while her editor pushes back when she veers toward despair. Tension tightens in Moscow, at the Dubrovka theater and Beslan school hostage crises, where her empathy becomes both shield and vulnerability.

Scenes shift between war‑scarred streets and sterile newsrooms, underlining the gap between battlefield suffering and editorial deadlines. Every frame hums with moral urgency,...