Jail return prompts Chelsea Manning doco recut

A scene from the documentary XY Chelsea. Photo / AP

Three years in the making, the Chelsea Manning documentary XY Chelsea premiered at New York's Tribeca Film Festival after being frantically recut to update the film with the latest turn in the saga of the former intelligence analyst.

Film-makers had envisioned a more celebratory evening.

"A few weeks ago, we were planning for her to be with us on the stage," director Tim Travers Hawkins said. "Obviously, things can change fast."

In May 2017, Manning walked out of the military prison at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, after President Barack Obama commuted her 35-year sentence for leaking troves of military and diplomatic materials — some 750,000 classified documents — to WikiLeaks. Hawkins, having already connected with Manning through her friend Lisa Rein and Manning's legal team, was there filming her release.

Chelsea XY is an intimate look at what followed for Manning — known as Private Bradley Manning when she was arrested in 2010 — after she uploaded the Army reports that came to be known as the Iraq War Logs.

Almost two years after being freed, Manning was jailed again in March after being found in contempt for refusing to answer questions before a grand jury about WikiLeaks and founder Julian Assange, arrested last month at Ecuador's embassy in London.

She can be held as long as the US Government believes it still needs her testimony in the case. It could take years.

Producer Isabel Davis said XY Chelsea was locked when Manning was again jailed. Changing the ending was, she says, "obviously quite a hard thing to make happen. It's taken a lot of goodwill."

But Hawkins says the arc of the film remains the same, that there was always an ominous feel around Manning. She herself mentions "an impending doom" in the film.

- AP