Reality

How does one strike a balance between morality and legality? Theater director Tina Satter makes an elegant and unsettling film debut with this low-key, yet striking, docudrama about the American whistleblower Reality Winner.

Reality, 25 years old yet with several years of experience as a translator in the US Air Force, returns home after a grocery trip to find two strangers outside her house. They identify themselves as FBI agents, carrying a search warrant for her home and belongings, while she herself is to be questioned. These are the seeds of the true story Reality tells, one that slowly yet surely reveals itself as the interrogation runs its course.

Reality is an intimate and intense docudrama about whistleblower Reality Winner. It is a film adaptation of director Tina Satter’s play Is This a Room? (2019), which, along with the film, takes its dialogue straight from the FBI interrogation tape of Winner’s questioning. Sydney Sweeney, known from the TV shows Euphoria (2019-) and The White Lotus (2021-), stars.

«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.»
– Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian –

Jenny Lund

Director

Tina Satter (b. 1974) is an American writer and director of film and theatre. She runs the New York-based theatre company Half Straddle, which she founded in 2008. In 2020 she received a Special Obie Citation for conceiving and directing Is This a Room? (2019). Later the same year she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship.

This film is part of