Truth and its shadows

A good film festival is a kaleidoscope in which even opposites are reflected. This is evident in two films at opposite ends of the spectrum: Cover-Up by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, and Bugonia by Yorgos Lanthimos. The former earned seven minutes of applause for its now-legendary protagonist, Seymour Hersh, a distinguished American investigative journalist obsessed with the truth and armed with numerous deep sources. His “lessons in journalism” elevate the documentary to the highest speculative levels on the truth of wars, the nature of armies, and the role of the fourth estate as the watchdog of democracies. Hersh’s thinking rejects official narratives and challenges the systematic impunity of power and its schemes. With him, a film becomes education. On the other end of the spectrum is Yorgos Lanthimos’ creation, which chooses the path of grotesque allegory to ridicule conspiratorial fanaticism, while also exploring with psychological delight the paranoia that inhabits us as a creeping fear, when the shared truths that cement our lives gradually show signs of disintegration.
Bugonia blends thriller, noir, and slapstick horror without fitting neatly into a defined genre – indeed, it creates its own. In the end, the characters reveal themselves for what they are not.
The two films highlight opposite yet complementary approaches to tackling the knot of uncomfortable, hidden truths. Let’s call them “conspiracies” for convenience, but they are rather the impossibility of giving a single name to reality, a radical, almost Cartesian doubt that undermines the lives of many. Poitras and Obenhaus seek factual precision; Lanthimos uses hyperbole to convey the farcical nature of contemporary paranoia. In both cases, however, cinema becomes the place where the ambiguity of the present – between observation and imagination – takes shape in the idea that truth today is no longer a solid block but a living, perhaps mutating, organism.