Sager’s doc is a carefully crafted insider view of that rare bird: high-end investigative journalism. The director embeds himself with Bastian Obermayer and Frederik Obermaier, the Munich-based Süddeutsche Zeitung reporters who initiated the co-ordinated Panama Papers revelations in 2016. Over two years the director follows them as they explore a number of stories, finally focusing on the funding and corruption scandal that brought down Austria’s rightwing government in 2019. In the opening scenes, a rare interview with US whistleblower Edward Snowden highlights the importance of, and high stakes involved in, careful investigative journalism. Danger lurks as Sager follows his two protagonists to Malta, where their collaborator in the Panama Papers story, Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, was murdered. The strength of this film lies in its intimate exposure of the journalistic process and the care taken in checking and re-checking the facts from various angles, putting the lie to facile charges of ‘fake news’ made by those in power who would rather commit their crimes in the dark.
Richard Swift
