The American playwright Tina Satter's powerful film directorial debut, Reality, presents a gripping account of the lead-up to the real-life arrest of a woman suspected of mishandling classified documents, in the wake of Donald Trump's rise to the White House.
Surprisingly, Satter had barely heard of Reality Winner before stumbling upon a story published in New York Magazine, months after the incident, and eye-catchingly headlined, “The world’s biggest terrorist has a Pikachu bedspread”.
Winner was a 25-year-old NSA linguist and decorated Air Force veteran when she was swooped on by the FBI at her home in a low-income suburb of Augusta, Georgia, for allegedly leaking a top-secret report of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election to the media.
Despite breaking through the post-truth noise of Trump and others telling people to look elsewhere, not at the Russians, the case scarcely caused a ripple in the public's consciousness.
“It did not get very much coverage,” says Satter, the daughter of a Jewish father and Catholic mother. “Certainly nothing like Snowden or Chelsea Manning, I think for obvious reasons of scope.”
She glimpsed a mugshot of Winner in the New York Times in the summer of 2017, but “never paid attention beyond the name”. And within the circles she moved, “never once would someone say, 'Have you heard about Reality Winner?' She just hadn't floated up into the conversation.”
Published in December 2017, the New York Magazine article made her pay attention. Winner had returned home from shopping on June 3, 2017, and found herself suddenly confronted by FBI agents, who interrogated her in an empty back room of her own house.
In one of a couple of moves that a former FBI agent told Satter were unusual, they recorded everything. The magazine included a hyperlink to a (redacted) transcript of the recording. Satter read it and was riveted.
As an artist whose work has frequently revolved around the theme of female adolescence, she was drawn to the “complicated, complex, young female protagonist”, and the “fascinating dichotomies” Winner presented as an ordinary American woman who was fluent in Farsi, Dari and Pashto, had been part of a military drone programme (and possibly developed PTSD as a result), and was working for the NSA as a translator at the time of her arrest.
As an American citizen, Satter was intrigued by the transcript's “record of the state at work in 2017, in the United States, on a Saturday afternoon”.
That particular day's work would lead to Winner receiving the longest prison sentence – five years - ever handed down under the Espionage Act. Some called her a traitor and spun her interest in Arabic languages as something sinister. But the information that Winner leaked - she has said “to fill in a question mark [over Russian cyber intrusion] that was tearing our country in half in May 2017” - was used, says Satter, “to prove that there were problems happening”.
The script-like quality of the FBI recording led Satter to use it verbatim for a play, Is This A Room, which went from Off-Broadway to Broadway. While Winner was in prison and could not give the project her blessing directly, Satter was in touch with her mother, Billie Winner-Davis, and sister Brittany.
“I was very explicit with her mother that it was the transcript [I was using], which was a really loaded document to them,” she says.
The playwright just wanted to show Winner's experience. For the relatives, though, at a time when hardly anyone was talking about the case, the play, says Satter, “was operating, not on purpose really, as one of the ways people were thinking of Reality's case and understanding more what had actually occurred.” The family hoped it might help lead to Winner “getting clemency, and then a pardon”.
Winner was released from jail, under draconian probationary restrictions, in June 2021, and Satter quickly got to talk to her over Zoom. Winner gave the playwright her approval to do the film, which also uses the transcript verbatim, and made herself available for research.
Nevertheless, “It's hard for her,” says Satter. “I don't want to put too many words into Reality's mouth but I think it's very traumatic for her reliving it. She does really firmly believe it's important that people see what she went through, though, and feels that other people, who are not white and with not as supportive families as hers, go through this constantly. But I do think it's fraught for her.”
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Sydney Sweeney in Reality (Photo: HBO)
In the film, Sydney Sweeney (Euphoria, White Lotus) gives an extraordinary performance as Winner, often under the pressure of close-ups that mercilessly scrutinise her face, leaving no room for falseness. Satter also weaves in photographs of the real Winner (one snapped by the FBI was useful in showing what Winner was wearing, but baffled her ex-FBI consultant, who couldn't think of a reason for it being taken) and posts from her Instagram account.
“Reality's Instagram before that day, June 3, 2017, was this really banal record of her life and it ends on June 2, 2017, with a kale salad in a bowl. So it's this kind of chilling record of a person's life up till a moment that changes it. It felt really fascinating to me because there's nothing in it at all that feels like, 'Oh, my God, this person's a dangerous person.'”
Throughout, you're conscious of Winner, dressed casually in shorts and Converses, being surrounded by male strangers. There is almost a Salem vibe, I half-joke. Satter smiles.
“But no, it's undeniable, right? She was literally getting ready for a date that night and then these armed men, they all were wearing concealed weapons, roll up. That gender thing was really very visceral to me when I read it.”
The men quickly seized Winner's car keys and mobile, and taped off her front yard.
“Reality has spoken to me about how she felt,” says Satter. “There were no neighbours out that day. No one was seeing what was happening, and anything could have happened in her mind, which I think feels like a very human and terrifying prospect.”
On the other hand, Winner was “physically really strong”, from doing CrossFit and yoga, and could do sports chat with the men. She also knew their security lingo, coming from the same world.
“So she inherently flips and even deconstructs a bit of the expected gender [dynamic],” says Satter. “Again, another really fascinating thing about her.”
The director likes to analyse, question, and experiment, and sees something almost Talmudic in her thinking and approach to her work. She wasn't raised Jewish, but since moving to New York has felt increasingly connected to her Jewish heritage.
“Once I was working as an artist and living in the city, I became more interested in things tied to, like, Jewish faith and even Judaic thoughts.”
As a child in the 80s and 90s, she lived in a “waspy, small New England town, in New Hampshire”. There was only one Jewish family living in the area, so the fact that her father was Jewish, albeit non-practising by the time she was born, felt “weirdly exciting”.
“When I was five or six,” recalls Satter, “I said, 'I don't understand where we're from if Daddy's Jewish. Where is his family from?'”
She learned later that they came from Russia, and changed the spelling of their name, which originally began with a zed, at Ellis Island.
Her father's Jewish roots held a greater fascination for her than her mother's Catholicism, but it wasn't until she saw her first Woody Allen film, the title of which she cannot remember, around age 18, that she realised just how culturally Jewish he was -- “That was when it became something much more visceral to me as a young adult.”
The arrival of Curb Your Enthusiasm was another moment of instant recognition. “My sister and I were like, 'That's Daddy!' It was so funny. But it sort of made me understand something very specific in terms of contemporary American Judaism.”
When friends complained about all the yelling in Uncut Gems, the Safdie brothers' nerve-racking portrait of a Jewish jeweller, played by Adam Sandler, Satter says it felt normal to her. “All that heightened thing is also very much my father and it feels very Jewish.” Something else that feels “a little bit Jewish” to her, although she admits that she might be “projecting”, is the way that she “only feels good even when things are going well if something's also not going great. That's a more relaxing state to me,” she says, laughing.
It is hard to imagine things going better for her than at this very moment. After the success of Is This A Room, Reality is garnering amazing critical plaudits, and could conceivably be a contender in several categories for major prizes come awards season.
Winner is now in a position to tell her own story, but Satter will always have been the first to bring it to the public in a dramatic context, and the film will help to spread it to a wider audience.
REALITY will be released in UK and Irish cinemas 2nd June 2023
