Cover-Up

It took twenty years of persistence from Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus for journalist Seymour Hersh to agree to let their camera into his office and memories. Fittingly, it is in the form of a spy narrative that the filmmakers portray the journalist who exposed the scandal of illegal chemical weapons use in the 1970s, reported on events including Osama bin Laden’s arrest, Watergate and the torture at Abu Ghraib prison, and who continues today to investigate the ongoing genocide in Gaza. He opens up, recalling his childhood amid the unspoken traumas of the Holocaust – which nonetheless forced his family to flee far from their Eastern European homeland – the immediate passion he felt for his profession, his tender love for his wife and children, and the periods of deep depression into which the horror of his discoveries often plunged him. Driven by personal ambitions, he has always striven to act as a counter-power, seeking justice for victims of state violence, such as the mother of a soldier involved in the My Lai massacre, who confessed to him:  “I gave them a good boy and they sent me back a murderer”.

Raphaëlle Pireyre

Mark Obenhaus
Cover-Up, 2025
Dreamland, 2011
Steep, 2007
The World That Moses Built, 1989
Miles Ahead: The Music of Miles Davis, 1986
Einstein on the Beach, 1985
Buying the Bomb, 1985
Abortion Clinic, 1983
Six American Families, 1977
Nomadenleben, 1977
Merc, 1973

Laura Poitras
Cover-Up, 2025
All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, 2022
Terror Contagion, 2021
The Year of the Everlasting Storm, 2021
Deathtrap on the East River, 2021
Triple-Chaser, 2019
Project X, 2016
Risk, 2016
Citizenfour, 2014
PRISM: Whistleblower, 2013
Death of a Prisoner, 2013
The Program, 2012
The Law in These Parts, 2011
O’Say Can You See, 2011
The Oath, 2010
My Country, My Country, 2006
Flag Wars, 2003
Free Tibet, 1998
Exact Fantasy, 1995
Renga, 1989