Things got unsurprisingly political in Venice on Friday as Seymour Hersh talked about the “existential crisis” facing America right now.
Hersh, a celebrated American political writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, features in Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’s Lido-bound project Cover-Up, the out of competition political thriller that traces Hersh’s explosive career, including his work exposing the 1968 My Lai massacre during the Vietnam war. “Cover-Up is both a portrait of a relentless journalist and an indictment of institutional violence,” the Venice Film Festival said, “revealing a cycle of impunity in the U.S. military and intelligence agencies.”
The conversation quickly turned to our current day politics and in particular, Donald Trump, at the film’s press conference. Hersh said: “There’s still integrity in America right now but as somebody said recently, we’re in existential crisis right now. And the president is a man who wants to be here for life. He wants to be commander of America. My belief is that’s his absolute sole mission. He wants to not have another election, because under the Constitution he cannot… That’s what he’s going to be doing for the next three years.”
Hersh continued: “And I will tell you, I don’t have the kind of access to him, but I’m working on
it… This a bad time for America, and because of that, because of this man’s megalomania and lack of information, it’s a bad time for the world.”
When asked if her work could be viewed as a form of activism in such a polarized world, Poitras — who worked for The New York Times for a period — said no. “I don’t agree with that statement. I think non-fiction is cinema, I think it’s art, and I personally think I make art that’s political… but I don’t consider it to be activism.” She said: “It’s just telling something called truth, which is a hard thing to tell, particularly in America right now.”
Laura Poitras for ‘Cover-Up’ in Venice.
Theo Wargo/Getty Images
Poitras was also asked about Kamala Harris losing the most recent presidential election and what’s happened to the Democratic Party since. “I really feel like the United States has been a continuous problem [with] both political parties that get inherited… That leads to the moment that we’re in now. And a lot of it has to do with the failure of journalism and the lack of adversarial journalism that’s asking hard questions — one of the things of the themes of this film is kind of cycles of impunity. These kind of atrocities are committed, they’re forgotten, and no one’s held accountable, and thus they happen again and thus we are where we are today.”
Hersh concurred. “It’s a terrible problem, it really is.”
The conversation continued and covered a myriad of topics, from the war in Gaza to journalistic credibility and the need to pursue facts. Cover-Up premieres at the 2025 Venice Film Festival on Friday, Aug. 29.