The Swiss festival Visions du Réel has announced that U.S. filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitras will be the Special Guest at the opening of the 24th edition of VdR–Industry, the programme dedicated to audiovisual industry professionals, to be held as part of the 2026 festival. Poitras’ participation will mark the official launch of the industry days on Sunday, 19 April, with a public conversation organised in collaboration with SRG SSR, as well as a screening of her most recent film, Cover-Up, included in the official selection.

With a career spanning more than two decades, Poitras’ body of work is defined by a strong political commitment and a critical examination of power structures in the United States, particularly in relation to mass surveillance, government impunity and abuses stemming from the so-called “war on terror.” Her films are noted for documenting moments of social upheaval in real time and for entering spaces of intense political and human tension.

Poitras made her feature-length debut in 2006 with My Country, My Country, a portrayal of the contradictions and devastating consequences of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, after which she was placed under surveillance by the United States Department of Homeland Security. She later directed The Oath, focusing on Guantánamo Bay and the architecture of the war on terror, and went on to make several short films while conducting in-depth research into global surveillance and whistleblowers. Her filmography also includes Risk, presented at the Cannes Film Festival, centred on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

A significant part of her work falls within the portrait genre, such as All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which follows photographer Nan Goldin in her activism against the Sackler family, linked to the opioid crisis in the United States, combining personal archives with direct footage of civic action. In Cover-Up, her latest film, Poitras constructs a meticulous portrait of investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, tracing some of the most significant journalistic revelations of the 20th and early 21st centuries through interviews and an extensive body of personal and media archives. The film was presented at the 2025 edition of the Venice Film Festival.

“Laura Poitras has been able to shed light on deeply moving, often unsettling and always urgent issues of our time, with sensitivity, artistic rigour and a voice that is unmistakably her own,” said Sabine Fayoux Cantillo, Head of Industry at Visions du Réel. “Her work has been essential in shaping our shared understanding of the world through a profound political awareness, and it continues to open windows onto complex topics from an uncommon sense of closeness.”

Poitras’ participation forms part of the broader VdR–Industry programme, which will run from Sunday 19 to Wednesday 22 April 2026 as one of the festival’s core components. The programme will include project presentations, works-in-progress sessions, conferences and networking activities. Full details will be announced on 25 March 2026, while the accreditation application form is already available.