Visions du Réel has the privilege and honour to announce that U.S. filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitras will be the Special Guest at the opening of the 24th edition of VdR–Industry, the Festival’s programme dedicated to industry professionals. On Sunday 19 April, the Oscar and Venice Film Festival award-winning filmmaker will present a conversation, in collaboration with SRG SSR, while her most recent film Cover-Up also will screen as part of the Official Selection.
Laura Poitras is notably the author of a post-9/11 trilogy, concluded by the Oscar-winning film CITIZENFOUR, a real-life international thriller about whistleblower Edward Snowden and global surveillance. Spanning more than two decades, Laura Poitras’s cinematic work speaks to a strong political commitment and critical analysis of U.S. government systems of oppression and impunity, as well as the abuses of the so-called “war on terror”. Her powerful films chronicle societal upheaval in real time.
Laura Poitras directed her first feature film, My Country, My Country, in 2006, which shines a light on the contradictions and disastrous consequences of the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Following this film, she was placed under surveillance by the United States Department of Homeland Security. Poitras’ next film, The Oath, focuses on Guantánamo Bay and the so-called “war on terror”. She continued her career with several short films and conducted in-depth research on mass surveillance and whistleblowers. In 2015, she won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for CITIZENFOUR, which reveals Edward Snowden’s initial disclosures. Part tense, closed-room drama, part paranoid thriller, this film documents the eight days spent with Edward Snowden in a Hong Kong hotel before he went into hiding. In the wake of this, Poitras presented Risk, a film about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, at the Festival de Cannes.
Part of Laura Poitras’ filmography falls within the portrait genre, such as All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, for which she received the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Accompanying photographer Nan Goldin as she takes on the Sackler family, owners of pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma, whose flagship drug, Oxycontin, is at the root of the opioid overdose crisis in the United States, the film combines an archival portrait of the New York photographer with handheld footage of her civic actions. Poitras’ latest film, Cover-Up, paints a portrait of American journalist Seymour Hersh, a leading figure in investigative journalism. It painstakingly weaves together interviews with a dense body of personal and media archives, retracing the major stories broken by the journalist, from the Mỹ Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, to the Watergate scandal, to the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib during the Iraq War. The film screened as part of Venice Film Festival’s 2025 edition.
Laura Poitras’ presence is part of the broader VdR–Industry programme, which will run from Sunday 19 to Wednesday 22 April 2026 as a core component of the Festival. This programme offers a variety of activities, including project presentations (pitching, works in progress), conferences and networking opportunities. Full details of the programme will be announced on 25 March 2026. The accreditation application form is available here.
Laura Poitras has been awarded an Oscar and the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent film, Cover-Up, premiered at the Venice Film Festival and was nominated for the BAFTA award.
Her film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Golden Lion, becoming only the second non-fiction film in the festival’s history to receive the top award. The film was also nominated for an Academy Award, won an Independent Spirit Award, and was named Best Documentary of the Year by the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Society of Film Critics.
Citizenfour received the Academy Award for Best Documentary, as well as numerous other awards including a BAFTA, Directors Guild of America Award, Independent Spirit Award, Gotham Award, the German Filmpreis and Cinema Eye Honors. Her journalistic work exposing the mass surveillance programmes of the US National Security Agency (NSA) earned her the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, and she received the George Polk Award for her reporting on national security.
Her Oscar-nominated film My Country, My Country, the first film in her Post-9/11 Trilogy, documents the U.S. occupation of Iraq, while the second part, The Oath, nominated for an Emmy, investigates the Guantanamo Bay prison and the US-led “war on terror”. Her other films include Risk, Flag Wars, Project X, Death of a Prisoner, The Program, Triple-Chaser and Terror Contagion.
The Whitney Museum of American Art commissioned Poitras’ first solo exhibition, entitled Astro Noise. Curated by Jay Sanders, the exhibition featured a series of immersive installations including Anarchist, O’Say Can You See, Bed Down Location, Disposition Matrix, November 20, 2004 and Last Seen. She has also been commissioned to create film installations for Manifesta, and n.b.k. Gallery, Berlin.
In 2006, the US government placed her on a secret watch list and detained and interrogated her numerous times at the US border. In 2015, she successfully sued the government to obtain her classified FBI files. The hundreds of heavily redacted documents reveal physical and digital surveillance, the deployment of FBI agents to her screenings, the interception of her private communications and a classified counter-espionage investigation.
Laura Poitras has received the Peabody Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and support from the Sundance Institute, Creative Capital, the Vital Projects Fund, Cinereach and other institutions. She is a co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a member of the advisory board of Forensic Architecture, and a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. She co-founded The Intercept, First Look Media and Field of Vision. Her production company, Praxis Films, is based in New York and Berlin.
