Only eleven Americans have ever been charged under the Espionage Act of 1917. Eight of them since President Obama took office. Oscar-nominated documentarian James Spione returns to the Festival with the incredible personal journeys of two members of that octet, Thomas Drake and John Kiriakou, along with Jesselyn Radack, the accountability advocate who helped bring their cases to light.

With particular resonance in the post-Snowden era, Silenced makes an impassioned and thought-provoking defense of whistleblowers as an indispensible unit in a functioning democracy. Spione catalogues the extraordinary lengths to which the U.S. government has gone to keep its most damning secrets, as Radack, Drake, and Kiriakou, the ex-CIA operative who first revealed waterboarding as an established agency practice, become cautionary tales for any American who takes the government’s fealty to Constitutional ideals as a given. Executive Produced by Susan Sarandon.

-Arthur Ryel-Lindsey

Directed by

James Spione