Spotlights feature conversations with high-profile film and television industry professionals who share helpful advice and insights on their career experiences and creative processes.

Celebrated filmmaker Laura Poitras joins Sundance Collab for a live, online conversation about her explosive new documentary Cover-Up.

Cover-Up, which Poitras directed with Mark Obenhaus, traces the work of America’s preeminent investigative reporter, Seymour Hersh. Hersh has exposed government corruption and abuses of power since the late-1960s, from the wars in Vietnam and Iraq to the present day. His work helped expose the My Lai massacre in 1969, the CIA’s domestic spying program in 1974, and the United States torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib prison in 2004. Cover-Up marks the first feature documentary about Hersh and his work, which remains massively influential (and at times controversial) to this day.

Among the most acclaimed documentary filmmakers of her generation, Poitras is best known as the director of CITIZENFOUR , a high-risk film that exposed the U.S. government’s global mass surveillance programs. CITIZENFOUR won the Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2015. In 2022, Poitras’ film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed won the Golden Lion for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival, only the second time in the festival’s history that a documentary film has won the top prize. Poitras’ film The Oath premiered at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Excellence in Cinematography Award.

Cover-Up premiered at the 2025 Venice Film Festival and has since screened at Toronto, Telluride, the New York Film Festival, and festivals worldwide. The National Board of Review named the film its Best Documentary of 2025, and Netflix acquired the film after its festival premiere. Cover-Up will be available to stream on Netflix beginning on December 26, 2025.

This hour-long conversation concludes with an audience Q&A, where attendees asked Poitras questions about her extraordinary film. Don’t miss this chance to learn from Laura Poitras, an honoree of the Academy, BAFTA, DGA, Emmy, Peabody, and Independent Spirit Awards.


Laura Poitras
Laura Poitras is an Academy Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning filmmaker and journalist. Her last film, ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED, premiered at the 2022 Venice International Film Festival where it won the Golden Lion for best film. The story of groundbreaking artist Nan Goldin, the film was nominated for an Academy Award and BAFTA, and won an Independent Spirit Award. Poitras’ film CITIZENFOUR won an Academy Award for Best Documentary, along with awards from BAFTA and DGA. Her journalism exposing the National Security Agency’s global mass surveillance programs received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, as well as the George Polk award for National Security Reporting. more...
Soheil Rezayazdi
Moderator | Digital Course & Event Producer
Soheil Rezayazdi is a Digital Course & Event Producer at the Sundance Institute, where he produces multi-session courses, master classes, filmmaker Q&As, and other digital programs for Sundance Collab. Prior to Sundance, Soheil served as the Nonfiction Programs Manager at the Gotham Film & Media Institute. He oversaw the Gotham’s core documentary programs: the Documentary Feature Lab, the Spotlight on Documentaries project market, and the Documentary Development Initiative in partnership with HBO Documentary Films. Soheil has worked with emerging filmmakers since 2015, when he began a seven-year tenure at the Columbia University MFA Film Program. At Columbia he managed the Columbia University Film Festival (CUFF), the Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival, and the Carla Kuhn Memorial Speaker Series. more...
Tags:DocumentaryDirectingActivism & Social Impact Spotlights

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