The network's latest Laura Poitras-produced feature will debut later in 2018, as the network also firms up a roll-out for Liz Garbus' New York Times series.

Showtime has bought the rights to a Laura Poitras-produced documentary about whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

The project, which first courted sellers at Cannes in 2017, will get a U.S. theatrical window (for potential Oscar consideration) and a subsequent debut on the cable's many platforms later in 2018.

Poitras, who won the Academy Award for Citzenfour and debuted her Julian Assange doc Risk on Showtime in 2017, produced the film alongside filmmaker Tim Travers Hawkins. The latter, the film's director, shot interviews and behind-the-scenes footage of Manning over two years. The feature picks up the day the transgender Army vet was released from an all-male maximum security prison, after President Obama commuted Manning's sentence for her role in disclosing classified materials to WikiLeaks as one of his final acts in office.

Tackling both matters of national security and transgender rights and visibility, XY Chelsea is produced by Pulse Films.

Showtime continues to invest heavily in the documentary space. The network also used its Saturday meeting with TV press to finally confirm Liz Garbus' long-in-the-works documentary series about The New York Times' aggressive year covering the start of the Donald Trump administration. The Fourth Estate premieres May 27.

“The Times is an odd and confounding muse for the current president," said Garbus in a statement. "Trump craves the positive coverage of his hometown paper while simultaneously denigrating the ‘failing New York Times' on what seems to be a daily basis. We’ve been given unprecedented access to capture the challenges, triumphs and pitfalls of covering a president who has declared war on the free press, from the point of view of those on the front line – the White House correspondents, investigative journalists and editors at The New York Times. It’s the story of a lifetime, but what kind of story is it? Is it the story of a new era of the American presidency, or is it a reality show debacle? This series explores these questions as we take a front row seat to those writing the first draft of this moment in history.”