**FREE** Q&Awards: COVER-UP

Cover-Up is a political thriller that traces the explosive career of Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. Urgent and deeply reported, Cover-Up is both a portrait of a relentless journalist and an indictment of institutional violence — revealing a cycle of impunity in the U.S. military and intelligence agencies. Drawing on exclusive access to Hersh’s notes, and interweaving primary documents and archival footage, Cover-Up captures the power and process of investigative journalism. (Synopsis by Netflix)

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. Her Academy Award-nominated film My Country, My Country, the first film in her post-9/11 Trilogy, documented the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

The Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited her first solo show of film installations, Astro Noise, in 2016. She is a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. She has also received a Peabody Award, Guggenheim Fellowship, and grants from the Sundance Institute, Creative Capital, Vital Projects Fund, Cinereach, and others. In 2006, the U.S. government placed her on a terrorist watchlist and afterward detained and interrogated her dozens of times at the U.S. border.

Amy Foote ACE is an Emmy Award winning documentary editor based in Brooklyn, NY. Some of her editing credits include Laura Poitras’s Oscar-nominated film, All The Beauty and the Bloodshed (Neon/HBO), Golden Lion Venice Film Festival, Girls State (Sundance Premiere/Apple/Cinema Eye Honor for Best Broadcast Editing) Father Soldier Son (Netflix/New York Times, Tribeca Film Festival Jury Award for Best Editing, News and Documentary Emmy for Best Editing, Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Sound); Hail Satan? (Magnolia); The Work (Grierson Awards for Best Single Documentary and Best International Documentary, Grand Jury Prize SXSW 2017, Gotham Award nominated for Best Documentary); Peabody award winning Mavis! (HBO); Fauci (Nat Geo/Disney Plus); the Emmy-nominated and James Beard Award winning film, A Matter of Taste: Serving Up Paul Liebrandt (HBO, BBC); The Mosuo Sisters (ITVS), For Once In My Life, (PBS Independent Lens, SXSW Audience Award 2010, IDA Best Music Documentary). and the Emmy-nominated film, Finishing Heaven (HBO). She started in film working as an intern for Jennifer Fox on her documentary series called Flying: Confessions of a Free Woman (edited by Neils Pagh Anderson - the Danish Editor who edited The Act Of Killing). She cut her first documentary feature after taking the 6-week course at The Edit Center in 2007. A key part of her career path was seeking out mentorship from several established doc editors while she was starting out – asking them to watch early cuts and seeking guidance about everything from structure to deal memos, appropriate rate to ask for and navigating the director/editor relationship etc. She most recently cut Laura Poitras’s recent film Cover-Up, about investigative journalist Seymour Hersh that recently premiered at the Venice Film Festival and will be streaming on Netflix soon.

Peter Bowman is a documentary editor from North Carolina. Most recently, he edited Cover-Up (2025) and was an additional editor on the Emmy Award-winning Girls State (2024). He has worked on documentary features and series for AppleTV, Netflix, and PBS.