Opening Night: Cover-Up
Description
Seymour ‘Sy’ Hersh is a renowned and respected—and at times divisive—Pulitzer prize-winning journalist. His remarkable six‑decade career includes groundbreaking coverage on the My Lai massacre, Watergate scandal, the horrors of Abu Ghraib, and much more. Filmmakers Laura Poitras (All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Doc Stories 2022) and Mark Obenhaus worked for 20 years to build this vital portrait of a determined truth-sayer and the final result is a remarkable film that resists hagiography. Instead, Cover-Up is a sophisticated interrogation of the process of investigative documentation and the weight of its real‑world consequences. As journalism and free speech are under threat, this timely documentary is essential viewing. – Jessie Fairbanks
Trailer
Biographies
Laura Poitras is an Oscar- and Pulitzer Prize-winning filmmaker and journalist. Her most recent film, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (Doc Stories 2022), premiered at the Venice Film Festival where it won the Golden Lion, only the second documentary to win the top prize in the festival’s history. Her film CITIZENFOUR (2014) won an Academy Award for Best Documentary, along with many other awards. Her journalism exposing the US National Security Agency’s global mass surveillance programs was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and the George Polk Award for National Security reporting.
Mark Obenhaus is an acclaimed documentary producer, director, and writer known for his compelling storytelling across film and television. He wrote and directed Steep (2007), a feature documentary exploring the world of big mountain skiing. Obenhaus has had a long and distinguished association with ABC News, beginning in 1991 as senior producer of the primetime news magazine Day One. He later served as executive producer of Dangerous World: The Kennedy Years (1997), a two-hour special inspired in part by the reporting of Seymour Hersh.