Cover-Up review – atrocity exposer Seymour Hersh, journalist legend, gets a moment in the spotlight

Hersh’s record on uncovering the big stories, from My Lai to Abu Ghraib, speaks for itself. This documentary watches him at work: dogged, nonconformist and combative Renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh was never played in a film by Robert Redford or Dustin Hoffman, like the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. But as this documentary portrait argues, he’s probably more important than either. Hersh has a longer record of breaking big stories, from the My Lai massacre in Vietnam to torture by US army personnel at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq – the latter a historic scoop underscored by the stomach-turning photos which Hersh brought to light. Hersh is asked if Abu Ghraib would have been the story it was without those pictures and replies: “No pictures, no story.” Well, maybe. But his other scoops had no pictures of this kind. One incidental thing Abu Ghraib showed was how ubiquitous digital photography became at the beginning of the century; how easy it was to take...

Norwegian Dream review – queer romance speaks for all the oppressed underclasses

This idealistic feature draws parallels between the struggles of immigrant Polish workers in Norway and the homophobia faced by two young lovers, but can’t quite sew up the two seams

Director Leiv Igor Devold makes an unexpected link-up between Norway, the country where he grew up, and Poland, where he attended film school, in this idealistic but sometimes heavy-handed second feature. He also finds invigorating cross-currents in contrasting the collectivist struggles of immigrant Polish fish-processing workers with another oppressed minority: the stuttering romance, in the face of homophobia, between young wage slave Robert (Hubert Miłkowski) and his supervisor Ivar (Karl Bekele Steinland).

Robert finds himself gutting salmon in a factory on a Norwegian island in order to send money back home. But it is Ivar – the black adopted son of the factory owner Bjorn (Øyvind Brandtzæg) – who gets under his skin. A wannabe actor slumming it courtesy of dad, he’s an unbridled karaoke diva and early-morning buster of moves in the factory car park, even with Robert’s dorm-mate Marek (Jakub Sierenberg) heckling him. Robert is fascinated, but it’s not the fear of his compatriots that stops him acting; it’s the self-hating homophobic imp on his back that has him clamming up every time he’s confronted with Ivar.

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