Over the course of their three most recent films, United States vs. Reality Winner (2021), Enemies of the State (2020) and National Bird (2016), director Sonia Kennebeck and producer Ines Hofmann Kanna have focused on telling the stories of whistleblowers, especially those with ties–real or claimed–to surveillance and national security.
Their latest film tracks the prosecution of Reality Winner, a young government contractor who leaked a National Security Agency document on Russian interference in the 2016 election to The Intercept, and went on to face the longest prison sentence ever imposed on a whistleblower in a federal court under the controversial Espionage Act from 1917.
Kennebeck and Hofmann Kanna will talk about the corpus of their work on national security, surveillance and whistleblowers, as well as source protection and the challenges faced by investigative journalists and documentarians. How can they keep telling these crucial stories when access to source material is obstructed by government agencies, when interview requests are denied, or protagonists barred from speaking? How do you protect sources and your team from harsh government prosecution?