Docs highlight power of investigative journalism

These Oscar-shortlisted films showcase how reporting can effect change and draw the ire of governments

- Story by Steve Dollar

AS INDEPENDENT JOURNAL-ism comes under increasing threat worldwide, a trio of Oscar-shortlisted documentaries offer revealing perspectives on risk-taking reportage that challenges institutional power with hard and often shocking facts.

At five-plus hours, Julia Loktev's "My Undesirable Friends: Part 1 — Last Air in Moscow" examines in depth a group of young female journalists countering state propaganda in Russia, even as they are systematically targeted by the government in the months before the country's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. "Cover-Up," directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus, focuses on the career of a single investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh, whose decades of exposés include his 1969 report on the My Lai massacre and his discovery of the American torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. And in “The Alabama Solution,” filmmakers Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman investigate systemic abuse inside the Alabama state prison network, collaborating with inmates equipped with smuggled cellphones.

When Russian-born American filmmaker Loktev began shooting “My Undesirable Friends” in 2021, she didn’t imagine how its subjects’ struggle would anticipate autocratic pressure on the free press in the United States.