Cover-Up Trailer: Laura Poitras Returns with Essential Portrait of Investigative Journalism

Returning with another astounding documentary after All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Laura Poitras has teamed with Mark Obenhaus to direct Cover-Up, a portrait of investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. Capturing decades of misdeeds and atrocities enacted by the U.S. military and intelligence, it also shows the necessity of independent journalism, encumbered by capitalistic ties. Set for a theatrical release beginning on December 19 at Film Forum, followed by a Netflix release on December 26, the first trailer has now arrived.

Here’s the synopsis: “Cover-Up is a political thriller that traces the explosive career of Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. Urgent and deeply reported, Cover-Up is both a portrait of a relentless journalist and an indictment of institutional violence — revealing a cycle of impunity in the U.S. military and intelligence agencies. Drawing on exclusive access to Hersh’s notes, and interweaving primary documents and archival footage, Cover-Up captures the power and process of investigative journalism.”

Savina Petkova said in her review, “Cover-Up is as thorough as a documentary of its kind should be, recapping its subject’s achievements and the battles he fought to see them in print while allowing more prescient, contemporary events to pierce its narrative. On two notable occasions, Hersch is filmed talking on speaker to an anonymous source in Gaza, and their conversation grounds the film in the present tense without making the connection too obvious. Cover-ups, as well as manufacturing denial and misinformation, have become a way of justifying war, normalized by American politicians––a legacy that can be traced in Israel’s coordinated, murderous attacks in Gaza––and while the film doesn’t need to point a finger, its commitment to uncovering systemic injustice does that well enough. In such regard, Cover-Up may as well be the most important American documentary of the year. Poitras and Obenhaus have made a documentary film that’s equally a film-document: informative, pedagogical even, in the ways it lets a subject tell the stories he has already told, well knowing that they shape an alternative political history of America, past and present.”

See the trailer and poster below.