From the amount of interviews that filmmakers Juliane Dressner and Miriam Shor pull from news reports from between 2015 and 2025 in “My NDA,” you can’t say that the rise of nondisclosure agreements hasn’t been well-documented, yet it becomes staggering to see it all pulled into context. After the barrage of coverage of the practice in the wake of the #MeToo movement when survivors of sexual assault put such agreements in the spotlight when they were prevented from coming forward because of contracts they signed, the impact they had on individuals could get lost as if it was a detail buried in fine print and in tracing the legal gambit back to its origins as a protective shield for companies not wanting to risk trade secrets about their products, only to be used for a broader and broader range of liability concerns, Dressner and Shor are able to show the damage they’ve done to society as a whole while relating how devastating they can be on a personal level.
The choice of subjects to follow proves crucial in “My NDA” where even the fact one participant has to drop out out of fear of violating their agreement adds to the picture Dressner and Shor vividly paint. Within the three that remain and ready to challenge their NDAs, the directors find a broad array of experiences when tracking Ifeoma Ozoma, a former public policy and social impact manager for Pinterest, from the moment she hits publish on a social media post calling out her one-time employer for preaching solidarity publicly as Black Lives Matter gained traction while privately refusing to compensate her in line with her white colleagues at the company, and Lachlan Cartwright, the former editor-in-chief of the National Enquirer who was responsible for coercing a number of people to sign NDAs himself as part of the “catch-and-kill” operation intended to protect powerful people from bad press by buying the rights to their stories with no intention to publish and now finds himself at the mercy of one as he attempts to atone for his past. However, the heart of the film in a variety of ways is Ashley Kostial, a former employee of the European tech giant SAP Software, who as the least public figure of the group seems to have the least obvious recourse after claims she was raped by a colleague on a work trip were settled through internal mediation, but as time moves on, she feels she was pressured into silence without being made aware of all her options, even with what she could reasonably assume was strong legal counsel.
When Kostial has to dive into the abyss of online searches in an attempt to seek justice, the value of “My NDA” becomes obvious when no audience member in similar circumstances would have to do so quite as blindly, walking through the process of not only protecting oneself against the legal ramifications of breaking a contract, but how those agreements come to be in the first place where the promise of an emotionally and financially taxing expenditure of time spent in court proceedings makes settling seem like the only rational decision. It clearly isn’t an empty threat when seeing the toll it takes on Kostial, who is plagued with self-doubt and battles PTSD from the physical abuse she experienced, still having to suffer through recounting it time and again to move her case forward. Yet the time spent with her reveals the financial retribution may be a bit of a scarecrow when looking bad is what these companies want to prevent in the first place and a protracted legal fight can appear to hold its share of peril for them as well.
“My NDA” privileges Kostial’s case when it is clearly the most compelling of the lot, creating a slight imbalance with Ozoma’s eventual bid to push legislation in California known as “Silenced No More,” preventing legal retaliation for speaking out about discrimination, and Cartwright’s publication of a tell-all piece in the New York Times as Trump, one of the major beneficiaries of the National Enquirer’s scheme, heads to court for the hush money trial he was ultimately convicted in. Still, the storylines collectively offer a well-rounded view of a shadowy area of the law that seems to depend on a certain level of stratification to obscure as the central trio work through various parties just to realize the obstacles in front of them and when making connections between them, at times literally, the shared knowledge really does feel powerful.
“My NDA” will screen again at SXSW on March 16th at 3 pm at Alamo Lamar 6 and March 18th at 3:15 pm at Alamo Lamar 3.