Double Exposure, the Washington, D.C film festival dedicated exclusively to investigative cinema, will open its eleventh year with the U.S. premiere of Eugene Jarecki’s The Six Billion Dollar Man.
The film is a deep dive into WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as well as a gripping, high-tech thriller and chronicle of an extraordinary saga—a portrait of a controversial visionary whose pursuit of government transparency reverberated worldwide. Assange’s journey from idealistic hacker to embattled publisher lays bare the new fractures that define the digital age: the tension between government secrecy and the public’s right to know.
The festival’s Saturday night Spotlight Selection is Cover Up, directed by Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus Cover Up explores the career of investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who broke the story of the My Lai Massacre in 1969 and has been at the forefront of many of the defining investigative reporting of our era, from Watergate to the Iraq War, and most recently the war between Russia and Ukraine.
The Centerpiece Selection is Abraham Joffe’s Trade Secret, a meticulously crafted exposé that journeys across six years and nine countries to investigate the troubled intersection of conservation, commerce, and the global trade in polar bear fur. Following a small, fiercely determined alliance of legal experts, activists, and Indigenous voices, the film grants unprecedented access to international conferences, luxury auctions, and Arctic communities, unraveling how loopholes in wildlife law and market pressures put an iconic species at risk.
Double Exposure’s Closing Night film is Norah Shapiro’s Magic & Monsters. The film tells the story of long-buried, widespread sexual abuse at America’s preeminent home for young actors, the Children’s Theater Company in Minneapolis, and the survivors who came forward to hold their abusers and the institution accountable.
Festival highlights include timely premieres that speak to the shifting political landscape and a dynamic lineup of special guests–among them Academy Award winning director Laura Poitras (Citizen Four, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed), Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Seymour Hersh, filmmaker Eugene Jarecki (Why We Fight, Freakonomics), actor Anthony Edwards (ER, Top Gun, Zodiac), and more.
Other timely and important titles on this year’s slate include: Ask E. Jean by Ivy Meeropol—an urgent documentary that explores the life of media personality E. Jean Carroll, who recently won a lawsuit claiming sexual assault and defamation against President Donald Trump. Canceled: The Paula Deen Story from Billy Corben explores the rise and fall of the Food Network star and the allegation of racism that ended her career. Listen to Me, directed by Stephanie Etienne and Kanika Harris, which follows three Black women on a journey of motherhood, from heartbreak to resistance, healing and joy.
Other timely and urgent selections include Poisoned, helmed by Joy Ash, which tracks an international investigation of a shadowy figure who sold lethal poisons to emotionally fragile young people on the internet, hundreds of whom are believed to have ended up killing themselves. Cycle, directed by Laura Dyan Kezman and William Howell, investigates the often-unseen impact of police violence in America by focusing on the killing of Ty’Rese West and the long struggle for accountability beyond headlines and hashtags. In The Black Swan, director Mads Brügger crafts a real-life thriller, following a whistleblower’s dangerous journey through Denmark’s criminal underworld and corridors of power. Finally, Khartoum, from Ibrahim Snoopy Ahmad, Timeea Mohamed Ahmed, Rawia Alhag, Philip Cox, and Anas Saeed, tells the intertwined stories of everyday Sudanese as civil war and hope for change collide.
Also from Sudan is the world premiere of Rovina’s choice, a new short film from Annie Wong and Tom Jennings, produced with Atul Gawande of The New Yorker. The film follows Gawande as he documents the consequences for one family–a Sudanese mother of nine who tries to stave off starvation at a refugee camp in Kenya–after the US government shutters USAID and its overseas food programs. Highlights of the shorts slate, to show all day on October 31 at MLK Library, include the world premiere of Status: Venezuelan, a new film from ProPublica’s Mauricio Rodríguez Pons and Almudena Toral; Joshua Seftel’s All the Empty Rooms which follows veteran CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp as they embark on a seven-year-long project to document the empty bedrooms of children killed in school shootings. Kate Stonehill’s Thank You For Allowing Me To Speak With You Today, is a deep-dive into the effects of Elon Musk’s massive cuts to government.
Double Exposure film festival, a project of the investigative news organization 100 Reporters, takes place October 30 to November 2, 2025 under the theme The New Fault Lines.
“This year’s slate reflects how new fault lines—splits in truth, trust, and power—are transforming the landscape of investigative storytelling,” said Diana Jean Schemo, founder and director of Double Exposure. “Each film probes the fractures where society’s old narratives no longer hold, from the reframing of governmental and scientific authority in The Six Billion Dollar Man and Bombshell, to the contested battlegrounds of race, justice, history, and collective memory explored in titles like Cycle, Magic & Monsters, and Cover Up.”
The Double Exposure Festival is paired with a professional symposium for investigative journalists and filmmakers. This year’s topics include panels and conversations on protecting sources, disinformation, legal advice for documentary filmmakers and much more.
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