Documentary film director Sonia Kennebeck is not here to present the truth to you in a neat little package.
Nowhere is this more evident than in her latest film, Enemies of the State, which is set to be released on July 30. In the movie, Kennebeck and her team tell the story of Matt DeHart, an alleged “hacktivist” who claimed he was interrogated and tortured by the FBI for helping to run a server for the WikiLeaks site. At the same time that DeHart alleges that this investigation took place, he was also being investigated by other law enforcement officials for soliciting child pornography.
Enemies of the State is not your typical documentary that relies on still images or calming, omniscient voice-overs.
DeHart’s parents, who cooperated fully with Kennebeck and her team, provide another layer to the story. Both military veterans and former national security employees themselves, they believed Matt’s assertions that he had been tortured and that the child pornography investigation was being used as a way to silence him about the files he had seen and forwarded from his WikiLeaks server. They believed him so fervently that they helped him try to seek political asylum in Canada.
Enemies of the State, the second in a series of recent films by Kennebeck about whistleblowers, defies attempts to summarize it. This is not your typical documentary that relies on still images or calming, omniscient voice-overs. Kennebeck opts instead to use actors to reenact key scenes, and to lip-sync along to real audio recordings. In this way, DeHart’s asylum hearing in Canada is presented as a courtroom drama, where we get to hear DeHart’s actual voice recounting his version of events.
Providing a more detailed synopsis or revealing the film’s plot twist ending, which some reviewers have criticized, would spoil the overall effect.
Kennebeck, in an interview with The Progressive, makes clear that her somewhat ambiguous ending was by design.
“We as a film team didn’t know the outcome when we went into the investigation,” she says. “This story has a lot of complexity, and I’m not going to create this black-and-white narrative, or fill this ambiguity that I think is a very important part of the story.”
Kennebeck and her team (many of whom she has worked with for more than fifteen years, including her producer, Ines Hofmann Kanna, and Torsten Lapp, her director of photography) make movies that rival any arthouse documentary or big-budget thriller—yet they cannot entirely hide their true colors as, above all else, investigators.
As a result, nearly the entire first hour of Enemies of the State is devoted to delivering an outline of DeHart’s story, and the many conflicting beliefs and assertions regarding who DeHart is and what he has done are never cleanly resolved.
The movie is less of a linear story and more of an exposé of the time and effort it took to investigate DeHart, his family, and all of the other individuals with whom Kennebeck’s team crossed paths. This includes DeHart’s hearings and self-presentation as an Anonymous hacker and whistleblower.
“This story is not one where you have to make it more exciting,” Kennebeck says. “The main challenge was to simplify it, while still staying true to the story and the complexities of it. . . . [W]e wanted to take the audience on the journey of our investigation.”
Enemies of the State, which will be released July 30, is Kennebeck’s second feature-length documentary; her first film, National Bird, for which she and her team won the Ridenhour Documentary Film Prize, was released in 2016. She has also completed a third film, titled United States vs. Reality Winner, that premiered at this year’s SXSW film festival but has not yet been given a wider release.
Watching Kennebeck’s three films together, as a trilogy of sorts, is an unsettling experience.
In National Bird, which was executive produced by Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire) and Errol Morris (The Fog of War), showed the effects of America’s drone warfare policies, particularly in Afghanistan. For the 2016 film, Kennebeck interviewed three military veterans and whistleblowers who had been involved with various aspects of drone strike operations.
One of them was Daniel Hale, first investigated by Barack Obama’s Administration and indicted under the Espionage Act of 1917. Hale has pleaded guilty to one of five counts against him for passing on information about the United States’ drone program. On July 27, Judge Liam O’Grady, Senior United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, sentenced Hale to 45 months in prison, although the Department of Justice was asking for nine years.
Hale is already incarcerated; in April, of this year he was deemed a danger to himself by the government and placed in solitary confinement in the same Virginia facility where Chelsea Manning attempted suicide in 2020.
In United States vs. Reality Winner, which premiered for critics in March but is not yet available to the public, Kennebeck tells the story of another whistleblower, Reality Winner, who revealed evidence of Russia’s tampering with the 2016 election. Winner was sentenced to five years and three months in prison after pleading guilty to leaking classified information to a media outlet.
Although Kennebeck was unable to interview Winner, who was incarcerated at the time, she used actors to re-enact Winner’s interrogation by the FBI at her home, while playing the actual audio that was recorded during the encounter.
National security stories are usually portrayed as so complex that they cannot be understood by anyone who is not an academic or an expert.
In a statement released for the SXSW festival, where Reality Winner premiered, Kennebeck described herself as a “first generation college graduate, who worked full time while completing her master’s degree in international affairs at American University in Washington, D.C.” It is perhaps her working-class background which enables her to tell sides of complex stories that other academics and reporters miss.
“I do think that my background informs what I see,” Kennebeck says. “In National Bird, I have three drone program whistleblowers. I found all these people individually. I found them through field and ground research, and two of them are women. I’ve wondered for many years, would a male journalist—and there are a lot of male journalists in national security—have identified these lead characters as the crucial sources that they were?”
National security stories (and the whistleblowers who often expose them) are usually portrayed as so complex that they cannot be understood by anyone who is not an academic or an expert on these specific issues. It’s somewhat ironic, then, that neither of the two people who have perhaps had the greatest effect on what we know about U.S. drone strikes and the 2016 election hacking—Daniel Hale and Reality Winner—are not college graduates.
Sonia Kennebeck, unlike an investigative journalist, does not make films that give us the answers. She makes films that encourage us to ask questions and investigate the stories ourselves, without relying solely on what we hear through social media. That used to be our responsibility, in a democracy. It is time to make it our responsibility again.
“Enemies of the State” will be released on July 30, three days after Daniel Hale was sentenced, and on National Whistleblower Day, which the National Whistleblower Center is commemorating with three days of programming and keynote speakers.