Sydney Sweeney is interrogated by the American authorities in a tense docudrama from the Panorama program at the Berlin International Film Festival.
Former American secret service employee Reality Winner (Sydney Sweeney), who is now a yoga teacher, returns home from the store. FBI agents are waiting for her in the yard, and they gently but insistently suggest the girl talk to them. They have a warrant to search her home and car, and they amicably «invite» Winner to agree to be interrogated «voluntarily.» What does it all mean? The heroine doesn’t seem to understand what they want, but even so she meekly agrees to let the agents into her home.
The 83-minute directorial debut of American playwright Tina Satter is a reproduction of the recording of the real interrogation of Winner, a former officer and translator in the American secret service who was arrested in 2017 for passing to the media a secret government document shedding new light on the 2016 US presidential election. The duration of the film matches that of the interrogation recording, which was in the public domain, and not a single phrase was altered. Satter shot Reality based on her play Is This a Room, written in 2019. The film is very simple but beautifully made, thanks largely to a bravura performance from Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria, The White Lotus). Reality, like its director, does not shy away from asking difficult questions about the nature of power, reality, freedom of speech, crime, punishment, and genuine victims.
The film will be shown in English with Russian subtitles.
Reality
Director Tina Satter
USA, 2023, 83 min. 18+