Reality Winner was a US Air Force vet and NSA employee whose leaking of an intelligence report about Russian interference in the 2016 election to The Intercept, which subsequently handed it over to the FBI in a bungled, source-disclosing attempt to verify it wasn’t a hoax, in turn led to her arrest. The saga has been well-documented, to say the least: Just this year, Tina Satter premiered her Sydney Sweeney-starring HBO film Reality, adapted from the playwright’s IS THIS A ROOM: Reality Winner Verbatim Transcription. Now we have Sonia Kennebeck’s Reality Winner, itself an extension of the 25 New Faces alum’s […]

“Reset!,” the theme of this year’s CPH:DOX, signals a focus “on a number of the most significant structural crises the world is facing today, but also on opportunities that arise and new solutions that present themselves.” This according to a recent press release quoting CPH:DOX CEO Tine Fischer, who will soon be leaving the festival she founded all the way back in 2003 to become the new director of the National Film School of Denmark. To say that Fischer is going out on a high – and highly ambitious – note is an understatement. Having ushered the 2020 edition seamlessly […]

Sonia Kennebeck’s National Bird is a humanistic look at those responsible for and affected by America’s divisive drone war program. Those working in drone warfare are thousands of miles removed from the destination of their attack, so National Bird is primarily placed in suburban America, away from the crimes at the film’s core. Through three former air force workers turned whistleblowers (and their victims), Kennebeck’s film is equally about an emotional and spatial disconnect. We do not interact with those we are affecting most – please feel free to draw your own parallels to current American politics here – and therefore the country can […]