Writer and activist Ruth Gruber was an intrepid witness to key events of the 20th century. In this wonderful film, the directing debut of cinematographer Bob Richman (The September Issue), Gruber’s vivid recollections are accompanied by a treasure trove of photographs and footage. The youngest PhD in the world at the age of twenty, Gruber became a foreign correspondent and photojournalist during the Great Depression. With wit and determination she covered everything from Hitler’s Germany, to unknown stretches of the Soviet Arctic, to Jewish refugee conditions in the 1940s, to the Nuremberg trials. When British destroyers attacked the Exodus and refused Holocaust survivors on board entry into Palestine, Ruth Gruber was the only journalist allowed on the ship to record the last leg of its return to Germany. Her pictures of the refugees raising the Union Jack flag, on which they had painted a swastika, rocked the world. Still a powerhouse at nearly 100 years old, Gruber today works at a writing desk encircled by towering piles of books.  NK