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...

Uncanny Me review – exploration of cloning tech fraught with moral and ethical questions

Creating a 3D avatar to increase a model’s income brings up all sorts of issues, but this documentary seems uninterested in addressing them

Doubles, doppelgangers, clones; twin visions have long fascinated directors and audiences alike. It’s unnerving, however, when technologies that once belonged to the realm of science fiction are now realised in the present. A German model called Lale is interested in creating a 3D clone of herself and this documentary from Katharina Pethke taps into a new unsettling reality.

The rationale behind the project sounds promising on the surface. As the company that offers the body scanning service to Lale explains, a 3D clone can take on a larger number of campaigns, without the hassle of paying an in-person crew, thus increasing Lale’s income. What is striking, however, is that the firm’s examples of 3D avatars are all of non-white models.With the recent push for more inclusivity in the fashion and modelling industry, could this be an easy way for brands to claim diversity without expanding their talent pool?

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