Focus: Laura Poitras
29.08.25 - 28.09.25
With a deeply critical and courageous gaze, Laura Poitras has redefined political filmmaking. Her body of work is an unflinching examination of resistance, oppression and representation. It interrogates power structures, urging audiences to question themselves and their own connections to these exposed systems of surveillance, control and modern warfare.
Poitras applies a deeply transparent process to her work, one that is grounded in rigor and truth-seeking. She has often said that success to her is not determined by a film’s ability to serve as a political message, but by its ability to challenge, inform and resonate emotionally.
With this focus program, Het Documentaire Paviljoen brings together four of her most pivotal works made between 2006 and 2016, a period in which she crafted a blazing portrait of the geopolitical present. These four films each address subjects that created a paradigm shift. Through them, Poitras tracks the global consequences of the West’s superiority complex and the erosion of civil liberties it has created in its wake.
Films
