Citizenfour - Edward Snowden Documentary

[Millard]

The Edward Snowden documentary that followed director Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald to Hong Kong where Edward Snowden gave them the stolen NSA files. "Citizen Four" was the pseudonym used by Snowden when he originally contacted journalist about blowing the whistle on the massive NSA covert surveillance program.

The documentary uses first-person film footage by Pointras during her visits with Snowden. It's directed by Poitras and executive produced by Steven Soderbergh. (It also has background music by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross).



Official website: https://citizenfourfilm.com/

 

[Michael Scally MD]

Poitras, who earned Snowden’s trust, reaches biggest audience with ‘Citizenfour’
http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifes...4d1694-5478-11e4-ba4b-f6333e2c0453_story.html

Nothing in her career as a documentary filmmaker could quite prepare Laura Poitras for an encounter in a luxury hotel room in Hong Kong in June 2013. It was there, amid absolute secrecy and after months of encrypted communications, that she met Edward Snowden. The once-anonymous contractor for the National Security Agency was about to become the world’s most famous whistleblower, leaking classified documents that exposed the unprecedented global and domestic reach of the agency’s surveillance programs.

“Being in the hotel room, I had an experience I had never had before,” said the filmmaker, who spoke after introducing a screening of “Citizenfour” at the New York Film Festival, where the film premiered Oct. 12 to a long, loud standing ovation. “There were things I filmed that I couldn’t remember that I filmed, and I saw them later in the footage. I just blocked them.” Although she remains behind the camera, Poitras was joined in the sessions by journalists Glenn Greenwald — to whom Snowden had likewise reached out and the filmmaker persuaded to participate — and Ewen MacAskill of the Guardian. They would become the conduits for the release of Snowden’s explosive revelations. (Many of the further revelations came in a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning stories written by Barton Gellman that appeared in The Washington Post.)

 

[Millard]

Kashmir Hill's review of "Citizenfour":

But as the New Yorker’s George Packer notes in his profile of Poitras, “the heart of the film is the hotel room in Hong Kong.” That would be the hotel room where NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden holed up for a week last year with Poitras, Greenwald, and Guardian journalist Ewen MacAskill and started the leak that launched a global debate about the intelligence community’s information binging in the digital age.

It is incredible that this historic week is captured on film. It is as if the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward were accompanied by a cameraman for his meetings with Deep Throat, or Daniel Ellsberg tailed by a reality TV film crew as he made the momentous decision to share the Pentagon Papers with the press. Not only is the week captured, it is captured in minute and humanizing detail…. Such close detail that one of my viewing companions suggested Snowden visit the dermatologist as he worried about some of his moles. It gives the TV show Big Brother a serious run for its money. The three participants (plus Laura Poitras, off screen) bond. Snowden’s hotel room steadily gets messier. You see the famous Tor and EFF stickers on Snowden’s laptop, but also that he has a copy of Cory Doctorow’s Homeland in the room — a meta touch given that the novel is about a protagonist with a thumbdrive of incriminating government documents who is trying to decide how to leak them. Everyone starts making more jokes as they get more comfortable with one another, even as the bags under Snowden’s eyes get darker as the stories he unleashed — and his identity — go viral. Poitras films Snowden at length simply watching the news, as anchors and experts debate the meaning of the government programs revealed — such as the mass collection of telephone metadata — and Snowden’s own motivations. It is riveting.

Source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmir...-part-of-the-snowden-documentary-citizenfour/

 

[berniec]

really low budget movie but worth the watch if you are a tech geek and just proves how little privacy we all have at the hands of the gvmt