(2025, USA, 117')
If we have come to know about the massacre of unarmed civilians at Mỹ Lai in North Vietnam, the violations and abuses at Abu Ghraib, the CIA’s covert operations in South America, and the use of chemical weapons by the U.S. military in the 1950s, it is thanks to the investigative reporting of Seymour Hersh. An American journalist and writer, Hersh won the Pulitzer Prize for his courageous investigations. The documentary, in retracing a career marked by highs and lows, revisits some of the more ‘uncomfortable’ pages of American history in the second half of the twentieth century.
American documentarian, producer, and filmmaker Laura Poitras (b. 1964) won the Golden Lion at the 79th Venice Film Festival for All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) and the Academy Award in 2015 for Citizenfour, about the NSA surveillance scandal exposed by Edward Snowden. Other notable works include Risk (2016), on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and My Country, My Country (2006), on the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
American writer, director, and producer Mark Obenhaus documented the lives of nomads on U.S. highways in Nomadenleben (1977) and explored the creative process of Philip Glass and Bob Wilson in Einstein on the Beach: The Changing Image of Opera (1985). He also produced Dangerous World: The Kennedy Years (1997) and ABC’s The Century (1999). His other documentaries include The Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy (2003), Steep (2007), and Dreamland (2011).
