This courageous British independent documentary maker began his career as Christopher Wenner, a theatre actor and director then co-presenter of the BBC’s flagship children’s TV program Blue Peter in the late 1970s. In the 1980s he started travelling to conflict zones – central America, Lebanon and others – to make documentaries.
From the 1990s he adopted the alias Max Stahl as a measure to enable his continued access to dangerous places – particularly Timor-Leste (East Timor), where he made his name filming a massacre by Indonesian troops in 1991. That and his later contribution to the documentary ‘Death of a Nation’ were major contributions to the East Timorese cause. His work in the 1990s took him also to Russia, Chechnya and the Balkans.
He lived his final years in independent Timor-Leste, founding the Max Stahl Audiovisual Centre for Timor-Leste, accumulating an archive of over 5000 hours of footage shot during the decades of independence struggle. He died of throat cancer in 2021.
Max (Chris) came to Kosovo in autumn 1997, both to make documentary pieces for UK Channel 4 News and as an independent observer of Serbian elections in the then province. His first reporting is on those elections. Alex Anderson, the Prishtina- based long-term observer of the OSCE election observation mission at that time, recalls: “Chris had an Indiana Jones vibe about him, even down to the hat.”
Max kept up his visits to Kosovo into the spring of 1998, making reports that valuably documented this period of simmering conflict beginning to explode, before it caught the attention of the world’s media.
On 9 March 1998 he was filming a mass demonstration in Prishtina, gathered to protest Serbian military violence in Drenica, when three leather-jacketed, armed Serb men pounced on him, dragged him through a doorway, robbed and beat him.
His description of what happened can be seen here::