Seymour Hersh Is the Subject of Netflix’s Cover-Up

Cover-Up, directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, profiles Seymour Hersh and is available on Netflix; it is a nominee for best documentary at the EE BAFTA Film Awards. The film reexamines Hersh’s breakthrough reporting on the March 1968 My Lai massacre, showing how he revealed the killings had been intentional after an initial official line that enemy forces had been defeated.

Hersh, 88, sits for lengthy interviews and allows the filmmakers into personal territory: his father, a Jewish refugee from Lithuania, rarely spoke and left the family’s dry‑cleaning business to him when he was 15, dying two years later. Midfilm, the documentary confronts a setback in Hersh’s career—material from a prepublished manuscript for The Dark Side of Camelot quoted letters later proved fake and were removed from the final book—but it also covers his later work exposing abuse at Abu Ghraib.

Obenhaus, who made three earlier films with Hersh, drew on a long collaboration and more than 100 hours of interviews.

Lithuania

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