Donald Trump’s presidency will keep American cinema busy for a while. In her feature film debut “Reality”, the filmmaker Tina Satter uses an audio document from this era to describe a serious paradigm shift in American politics.
Legal action against so-called whistleblowers was drastically tightened under Barack Obama, but the case of the 25-year-old Reality Winner is directly related to the Trump era.
On June 3, 2017, the linguist employed by an NSA client received a house call from two FBI agents with a search warrant. A few weeks earlier, Winner leaked a secret report on Russian intelligence’s interference in the 2016 US election. Through the carelessness of the online platform, she was identified as the source.
Satter’s film is a re-enactment of the transcript of the 107-minute interrogation of Winner, played by Sydney Sweeney (“Euphoria”, “The White Lotus”), by two FBI agents that June day in 2017 actual process, reinforced by the fact that the blackened parts of the text also remain empty spaces in “Reality”.
Winner is an interesting figure, precisely because of Sweeney’s all-Americanness – the former member of the US armed forces had a pink automatic weapon lying around in her house – Trump’s policy is once again taken ad absurdum.
At the same time, “Reality” also has comical traits, because the course of the conversation always remains recognizable as a farce due to the awkward good cop/bad cop routine of the FBI men (Marchánt Davis and Josh Hamilton).
For Winner, however, with serious consequences: five years in prison. A formally convincing film essay with the means of star cinema, which deserves a place in the Encounters section.
To home page
