He traveled around the world and the United States making documentaries about urgent moral issues. He was shot to death while filming in Ukraine.
Brent Renaud, who with his brother Craig formed a Peabody Award-winning documentary film team that drew attention to human suffering, often working with major news organizations like The New York Times, was fatally shot in Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv, on Sunday. He was 50.
Mr. Renaud was the first journalist on assignment from an American news organization to be killed while reporting on the war in Ukraine. It also appeared likely that he was the first foreign journalist killed during the conflict.
Juan Arredondo, a photographer and adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, told The Associated Press that he was traveling with Mr. Renaud and that he was injured in the same attack. Annalisa Camilli, an Italian journalist, posted a video on Twitter of Mr. Arredondo at a hospital in Kyiv.
Capt. Oleksandr Bogai, the deputy chief of police in Irpin, said Mr. Renaud was shot in the head when Russian forces fired at his car, which was being driven by a local civilian across a Ukrainian checkpoint near the northern border of Irpin.
Mr. Renaud’s death was also confirmed in a phone interview with Craig Renaud, who was not with him in Ukraine at the time. A little over a decade ago, Craig started a family, and since then, Brent has done the filming in combat zones.
He said Brent was working for MSNBC and the television and film division of Time magazine on a multipart series about refugees around the world called “Tipping Point.”
“Brent was in the region working on a Time Studios project focused on the global refugee crisis,” the editor in chief of Time, Edward Felsenthal, and the president of Time and Time Studios, Ian Orefice, said in a statement. “Our hearts are with all of Brent’s loved ones. It is essential that journalists are able to safely cover this ongoing invasion and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine.”
Initial news reports described Mr. Renaud as a reporter for The New York Times after photographs appeared on Facebook showing his body and a Times press badge. The Times posted a statement on Twitter saying that the press badge had been issued many years ago and that Mr. Renaud had not been on an assignment for the paper.
Mr. Renaud could speak knowledgeably about sociological data and history, but the special quality of his work came from a mix of compassion and reportorial legwork. The Renaud brothers’ movies examined social issues through intimate portraits of people that reveal how they see their own world.
Migration under desperate circumstances, the focus of Mr. Renaud’s last project, was a recurring theme for him. Along with his brother, he made documentaries about Haitians deported from the United States and children fleeing poverty and danger in Central America.
Other of the Renauds’ subjects included war, drug addiction, gang violence, homelessness and environmental calamity.
They won their Peabody for “Last Chance High,” which tells the story of a school in Chicago whose students suffer from emotional disorders and have been expelled from other public schools in the city.
Articles in The Times described the Renauds’ movies as “provocative,” “remarkably intimate” and “startling, understated.”
Their approach involved risks. David Rummel, a former senior producer of video at The New York Times who edited the Renauds’ first projects for the paper, said in a phone interview that a story by the Renauds involving the children of gang members in Mexico exemplified the best qualities of their reporting.
“I’d never seen anything like that before,” he said. “They’d take the time to find the story that nobody else was doing.”
Mr. Rummel also said that he “was often concerned about their well-being,” though he added, “It wasn’t like they were oblivious to the consequences of going where they went. They weren’t taking inordinate risks.”
In a 2013 interview with Filmmaker magazine, Brent Renaud described facing violence for the sake of his work — repeatedly being attacked by thugs while reporting on a crackdown against the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo, for instance, and drawing fire from soldiers in Cambodia when the car he was riding in crashed through a military checkpoint.
“It is important when covering conflict to understand the politics and the players involved,” he said. “You have to know where it is relatively safe to be, and when.”
Mr. Renaud employed a spare approach that gave him mobility, flexibility and relatively unfiltered access to what he was filming. He often spent more than a year on a single subject. He tended not to work with a crew, to use distracting equipment — tripods, big lights — or to insert music or voice-overs into his movies.
“It’s about being so close you’re almost seeing things from the subject’s point of view,” he told the trade publication American Cinematographer in 2007. “We try to disappear.”
Brent Anthony Renaud was born on Oct. 13, 1971, in Memphis, and he grew up in Little Rock, Ark. His father, Louis, was a salesman, and his mother, Georgann Freasier, was a social worker.
In the late 1990s, he got a master’s degree from the Columbia University Teacher’s College. While in New York, he began working at the Downtown Community Television Center, an organization that produces documentaries and teaches filmmaking. Craig moved to the city to join him there. Working with its co-founder, Jon Alpert, launched their careers.
In addition to his brother, Brent is survived by his parents and a sister, Michele Purifoy. He lived in Little Rock and New York.
To film “Off to War: From Rural Arkansas to Iraq,” a 10-part documentary that first aired on television in 2004, Brent spent months in Iraq filming Arkansas National Guardsmen who had been deployed to the war.
The documentary also concerned their families, and Suzanne Hertlein, the mother of one of the disillusioned young soldiers in the movie, told The Hartford Courant in 2005 that she was initially “reluctant” to participate.
Then she met Brent. She said she wound up treating him like her own son.
“It upsets you to know that he’s in danger,” Ms. Hertlein said about the experience of watching her son in the movie, which recorded from up close his unit fighting in the streets of Baghdad. “You can imagine all sorts of things. But sometimes it was a comfort just seeing him and seeing some of his day-to-day activities.”
Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting.
