Oscar-Contender From Laura Poitras And Mark Obenhaus Documenting Investigative Journalism Powerhouse Seymour Hersh

Legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh can get just about any source to talk. Sometimes they do it willingly, perhaps to advance their own interests; other times, they might need a bit of coaxing with the help of Hersh’s celebrated charm and gift of gab.

But turn the tables a bit and Hersh can prove quite reticent about opening up himself. Oscar-winning filmmaker Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus discovered that as they put questions to him for their documentary Cover-Up, which just earned a nomination for Best Production from the IDA Documentary Awards.

“We’d love to talk about sources,” Poitras asks Hersh in the just-released trailer for the Netflix film. Hersh replies, “Let’s put it this way. You’d love to talk about sources, and I’d love not to talk about sources.”

Watch the trailer above.

The Oscar-contending film will get a theatrical release in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, DC, as well as Canada and the UK on December 5. It will open theatrically in New York on Dec. 19, before premiering on Netflix on Dec. 26.

The exchange between filmmakers and protagonist cited above makes it sounds like an adversarial relationship existed between them. In fact, the interested parties got over any temporary conflicts and the resulting film not only sheds light on Hersh as a person and on his professional approach, but most importantly on his extraordinary work: breaking the My Lai Massacre story during the Vietnam War, numerous important scoops during Watergate, revealing the Abu Ghraib scandal during the Iraq War, and much more.

“In the instance of something like My Lai, he was horrified by the massacre but didn’t want to pin it just on the soldiers,” Poitras told us in an interview shortly before the film’s world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. “He looked at the chain of command and to expose the chain of command. And I think that’s why he’s continually obsessed by going back to these stories because of these cycles of impunity… It drives Sy and is a source of profound moral outrage.”

Obenhaus added that Hersh doesn’t let that moral outrage cloud his judgment.

“It’s certainly expressed in the film his strong feelings about My Lai, Abu Ghraib, other events,” Obenhaus observed. “But I don’t think it is of such a nature that it colors his search for the facts. And I think My Lai is a very good example of that, that he was passionate about the [Vietnam] war and that the war was wrong… But I don’t think at any point does it color his actual factual reporting.”

Cover-Up screens Friday and Sunday at IDFA (International Documentary Festival Amsterdam) and just played at DOC NYC where it was programmed among a group of documentaries considered by the festival to be the best of the year.

Cover-Up is produced by Yoni Golijov, Laura Poitras, Mark Obenhaus, and Olivia Streisand, with cinematography by Mia Cioffi Henry. Amy Foote (ACE), Peter Bowman, Laura Poitras edited the film.

Watch the trailer for Cover-Up above.