A film by Laura Poitras , Mark Obenhaus
With: Seymour Hersh
For the past six decades, Seymour Hersh has been at the front lines of political journalism in the U.S. This arresting documentary, released at a crucial moment for the freedom of the press, tells the wide-ranging story of this breakthrough reporter.
Our rate: *(*)
Laura Poitras‘ new documentary (co-directed with Mark Obenhaus), Cover-Up, does not fall into the same category as All the Beauty and Bloodshed, her previous documentary, which rightly won the Golden Lion in 2023. In a style that is as rich as ever, denouncing the way the world works, the two filmmakers focus on a colorful character, a modern-day resistance fighter who has dedicated his life to countering power in the United States: journalist Seymour Hersh, a specialist in military affairs and the secret services, who won the Pulitzer Prize. He successfully exposed numerous government scandals, investigated chemical weapons, the Vietnam War, Watergate, and abuses during the Iraq War in Abu Ghraib prison, among others, which the documentary revisits without revealing all the secrets. Without saying so, the documentary focuses on the man himself, on the qualities that make him an extraordinary journalist: his tenacity, his rebelliousness, his particular relationship with rules, ethics, his values, and his constant commitment. It also revisits his flaws, his faults, and his mistakes during an investigation into the Kennedy affair and false revelations in alleged correspondence with Marilyn Monroe that turned out to be fake. The strength of the documentary is also its weakness: it is overflowing and intertwines the important with the anecdotal, jumping from one subject to another, with a deliberately vague structure that is neither thematic nor chronological, seeking to form a whole and intensify it. The result is a powerful statement and a striking portrait, but the subject matter is too complex to really draw us in, and somewhat frustrating in terms of the secrets it reveals.