The Paris Theater is thrilled to announce a special advanced screening of Cover-Up, Academy Award winner Laura Poitras’ new documentary, directed with Emmy Award winner Mark Obenhaus, which focuses on the career and legacy of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh. The screening takes place on Sunday, November 23, and will be followed by a Q&A with Laura Poitras and Seymour Hersh moderated by award-winning filmmaker Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding).

In his fifty-plus years as a reporter, Hersh has exposed some of the worst atrocities committed and  covered-up by the U.S. government, including the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, and the torture of prisoners during the Iraq War. Cover-Up continues Poitras’ unwavering commitment to examining government secrecy and systemic abuses of power, often through the lens of a protagonist  who takes action at great personal risk. 

To celebrate the release of Cover-Up, the Paris Theater will present Secrets & Lies: Through the Lens of Laura Poitras, a complete retrospective of Laura Poitras’ feature and selected short films, coupled with a repertory series of classic films with themes that embody the spirit of Poitras’ work: explosive investigative reporting, the unsteady media landscape, and corruption of the highest order. Screening dates for this series will be announced on December 3.

The series will include Poitras’s “Post-9/11 Trilogy” beginning with the Oscar-nominated My Country, My Country (2006) about the U.S. occupation of Iraq, and The Oath (2010), documenting Guantanamo Bay Prison and the U.S. “war on terror.” In the process of making her trilogy, the U.S. government placed Poitras on a secret terrorist watchlist, a fact Edward Snowden referenced in his initial communications with Poitras, which led to the trilogy’s final film, Academy Award-winning CITIZENFOUR (2014). The screening series will also include Poitras’s early work including Flag Wars (2003) directed by Linda Goode Bryant and co-directed by Poitras, and her more recent films Risk (2016) and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022), which won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, only the second documentary to win the top prize in the festival’s history. 

Secrets & Lies will also showcase a selection of films, curated in consultation with Poitras, that document the crucial need for fearless reporting – or other forms of troublemaking –  when speaking truth to power. These films feature depictions of real-life groundbreaking journalism, like Woodward and Bernstein’s exposé of the Watergate scandal as told in All the President’s Men, Edward R. Murrow’s nightly stand against McCarthyism depicted in George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, and the Boston Globe’s uncovering of decades of abuse within the Catholic Church in Spotlight. We’ll also feature conspiracy thriller The Parallax View, a fictionalized account of paranoia that reflected very real American anxieties, and the Romanian documentary Collective - Oscar nominated for both Best International Feature and Best Documentary in 2021 - which follows a newspaper’s hard-hitting investigation into corruption and fraud in the country’s public health care system.

Tickets to the special advanced screening of Cover-Up are available now.

Secrets & Lies: Through the Lens of Laura Poitras complete schedule including special guests will be announced on December 3.