COVER UP

There’s reporting, there’s investigative reporting, and there’s Seymour Hersch. In a career that has covered 60 years, including famous scoops on the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam and the torture and abuse of prisoners by American military personnel at Abu Ghraib Prison, Hersch has broken a lot of stories and generated at least an equal amount of controversy. Cover Up looks at both. Renowned Oscar-winning documentarian Laura Poitras (All the Beauty and Bloodshed, VTIFF 2023) had wanted to profile Hersch for 20 years and finally got him to agree, though his own rueful and amusing onscreen commentary makes you wonder if he’s re-thought that decision. Poitras and co-director Mark Obenhaus hit Hersch’s high notes but didn’t shy away from controversy, which has followed his career in equal measure with success. As newspapers and magazines fade, and the concept of journalistic integrity is repeatedly battered, Cover Up uses Hersch’s career to ask some very basic and deep contemporary questions: What is the truth? Who do we believe? Who can we trust? What’s next? ~SM