XY CHELSEA – Review by MaryAnn Johanson

It slips by in such a way that you’d be forgiven for not picking up on it, but it’s key to everything that we see in XY Chelsea, the necessarily jagged new documentary portrait of US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. This is it: The soldiers who serve in the military are so, so young, someone notes, and few people realize this. Even now, after all she’s been through and for as long as she’s been in the news, Manning is only 31 years old, and spent a significant chunk of her 20s in prison. Her decision, while she was serving in Iraq as an intelligence analyst, to leak sensitive and classified army documents to Wikileaks, was a decision she made in her very early 20s, when she was still trying to figure out who she was… when in fact she joined the army to help her try to figure out who she was.

I say this not as any sort of excuse for her whistleblowing: it doesn’t need to be excused; she absolutely did the right thing; the world needed to know that American soldiers were committing war crimes and the US government was covering it up. That’s the position of this documentary, too, the feature debut of British filmmaker Tim Travers Hawkins. But Manning’s relative youth is why the film feels, at times, scattered, uncertain, even a little lost: because it is reflecting its subject. Continue reading…