“…the gripping Snowden documentary offers a portrait of power, paranoia and one remarkable man.” The Guardian
More gripping than your average blockbuster thriller and twice as worthy, Oscar-winner Laura Poitras’ documentary CITIZENFOUR is as stressful to watch as it is to ponder, post-viewing. It even begins in an intriguing way, when after Poitras receives encrypted emails from someone with information on the government's massive covert-surveillance programs, she and reporter Glenn Greenwald fly to Hong Kong to meet the sender, who turned out to be the now-legendary Edward Snowden. It sucks you in from the get go, and then spits you out the other side, horrified, paranoid and ever so slightly despressed.
“…the gripping Snowden documentary offers a portrait of power, paranoia and one remarkable man.” The Guardian
More gripping than your average blockbuster thriller and twice as worthy, Oscar-winner Laura Poitras’ documentary CITIZENFOUR is as stressful to watch as it is to ponder, post-viewing. It even begins in an intriguing way, when after Poitras receives encrypted emails from someone with information on the government's massive covert-surveillance programs, she and reporter Glenn Greenwald fly to Hong Kong to meet the sender, who turned out to be the now-legendary Edward Snowden. It sucks you in from the get go, and then spits you out the other side, horrified, paranoid and ever so slightly despressed.
The film intimately documents whistleblower Snowden’s efforts to lift the lid on the intrusive post-9/11 US eavesdropping industry, which stretches far and wide across the globe. And Snowden is an unlikely, geeky hero, who shows no signs of wanting to be the centre of any story. On the contrary, he seems positively camera-shy as Poitras captures him in his Hong Kong hotel room in 2013, over eight tense days during which his revelations are first made public. He is tense and clearly frightened, but feels such a need to let his story be told that he is willing to sacrifice his future and that of his loved ones.
Unlike many newly minted, global media faces, Snowden tries his hardest to weigh up the importance of standing up to be counted against the possibility of the story becoming about him, rather than his information. He talks to reporter Glenn Greenwald - Snowden contacted him under the handle Citizenfour, hence the film’s title – who then wrote about it for Salon.com, in his book ‘No Place to Hide’ and for The Guardian. The word was officially spread and the “whistleblower” was an overnight celebrity of sorts. Snowden risked his neck, revealing that despite official statements to the contrary, the US and the UK were widely using their ability to eavesdrop upon every phone call, every email, every web search, every tap of the keyboard. He asserts that the mining of data has gone beyond suspicion of terrorist activity and has become positively akin to Big Brother, hence the documentary’s perfect choice to close Rialto’s Big Brother series. As Snowden says: “We are building the biggest weapon for oppression in the history of mankind,” and a qualified martial law for intercepting telecommunication is being created by stealth.
Poitras, an award-winning filmmaker, had good reason to be paranoid too. At time of filming she already had a "public key" (which you need for PGP AKA “pretty good privacy” encryption of data), and had made two films since the September 11 attacks that attracted the unwanted attention of US security agencies. The first, My Country, My Country (2006), documented life for Iraqis during the US occupation. The second, The Oath (2010), was about two Yemeni men who had worked for Osama bin Laden. Both films won major awards and were feted by the industry and critics, but it wasn’t long before the United States government had put Poitras on their security watchlist. She claims she was picked up for questioning at the US border more than 40 times between 2006 and 2012. Her laptop and camera were confiscated at timeds, and she was threatened with arrest when she started to take notes. The border searches stopped only after she contacted Greenwald, a blogger for the aforementioned Salon.com and later, The Guardian who is also a former litigator with a strong interest in privacy and human rights issues.
In fact, Snowden actually contacted Greenwald before Poitras, but the reported became annoyed with all the security measures demanded by the anonymous source. If only he knew, huh?
Anyway, enough from me - CitizenFour won the Oscars 2015 for Documentary Feature with good reason, so I strongly recommend that you watch it yourself.
CITIZENFOUR has been brought to Rialto Channel’s screen in association with the New Zealand Listener, so pick up the latest issue for more about this terrifying tale.
