Three years after Venice welcomed (and awarded the Golden Lion to) Laura Poitras’s documentary about artist and activist Nan Goldin, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, another filmic portrait by the Academy Award-winning director graces the Lido. Cover-Up, co-directed by Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, revolves around legendary journalist Seymour (Sy) Hersh and his career spanning from the 1960s to the present day. A title card announces that Poitras first approached Hersch some 20 years ago, and after having worked with Obenhaus on a few documentaries, he has finally agreed to participate in the project that is now Cover-Up.
Patience is a virtue both co-directors possess in abundance. That’s clear to see from their respective back catalogues––Citizenfour had Edward Snowden and The Oath had Guantanamo Bay prisoner Salim Hamdan and his brother-in-law Abu Jandal, Osama bin-Laden’s former bodyguard. Also evident is Hersch’s reluctance to speak about himself in a critical or analytic way, as well as his consideration for the identities of various sources, to which both Poitras and Obehaus respond on occasion from the off-screen space. Their interjections are reassuring, but also pointed––much like the journalist’s own approach, as he himself recounts it when narrating.
Hersch is responsible for some of the biggest breakthroughs in US political journalism, reporting on chemical and biological weapons, the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, Watergate, the “Family Jewels,” the Gulf War, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, among others, and the film has him narrate the timelines, the sources, and the editorial work involved. His interviews are also paired with those of colleagues and editors, and many scanned newspaper clippings; not to mention Hersch’s own archive of photographs, notebooks, maps, and highly confidential documents, all shown in slideshows. Seeing him narrate those harrowing stories, decades after putting pen to paper to articulate them, means witnessing an authentic mix of cockiness and utter despair, befitting a character so committed to the Truth that he doesn’t notice it eating away at him for years.
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.
That most of Hersch’s breakthroughs have been, in one way or another, reported on and drowned out in the media noise is also quite telling: without overtly stating it, the film also undercuts the image of him as a journalistic messiah or prophet-of-sorts: he was simply more persistent. In all the gloom that haunts Cover-Up, there is a sizable amount of hope, too, and the film’s biggest strength lies in its subtlety. Poitras and Obenhaus are content with letting Hersch speak to the extent he feels comfortable with, even if that means him calling off the whole thing. Towards film’s end he seemingly bows out, but a tinge of optimism remains so long as he keeps talking: silence breeds oppression. Cover-Up may be a quieter call to action, but a call to action nonetheless.
Cover-Up premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival.
The post Venice Review: Cover-Up Is the Most Important American Documentary of the Year first appeared on The Film Stage.
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