Arriving to nearly unanimous praise at New York Film Festival this weekend was a late addition, director Laura Poitras‘ documentary Citizenfour. With rare, intimate access to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, the film not only captures the encounters in the days surrounding the major events that would come to fruition, but a look at all-encompassing government surveillance.
While our review will be arriving shortly ahead of a release later this month, the first trailer and poster have landed, along with the full New York Film Festival Q&A with Poitras. The 30-minute discussion revolves around the secrecy and origins of making the film, convincing Snowden to go in front of a camera, introducing a first-person perspective, working with Glenn Greenwald, and much more. Check out the conversation and trailer below.
In January 2013, filmmaker Laura Poitras (recipient of the 2012 MacArthur Genius Fellowship and co-recipient of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service) was several years into making a film about surveillance in the post-9/11 era when she started receiving encrypted e-mails from someone identifying himself as “citizen four,” who was ready to blow the whistle on the massive covert surveillance programs run by the NSA and other intelligence agencies. In June 2013, she and Greenwald flew to Hong Kong for the first of many meetings with the man who turned out to be Edward Snowden. She brought her camera with her. The film that resulted from this series of tense encounters is absolutely sui generis in the history of cinema: a 100% real-life thriller unfolding minute by minute before our eyes.
Citizenfour opens on October 24th.