In its elegant simplicity, its formal daring and superbly subtle and controlled performances, Tina Satter’s movie is surely one of the best at the Berlin film festival: an eerily gripping true-life drama concerning people who look like elaborately reanimated, hyperreal ghosts from the past.
This is an exercise in verbatim cinema inspired by the case of Reality Winner, a 26-year-old US intelligence officer and translator who in 2017 was arrested for leaking to the media a secret government document concerning apparent Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Her first name was an idea from her dad who had been inspired by a T-shirt reading “I coached a real winner” and wanted something aspirational. And her name is here endowed with an ironic new meaning.
