Kurt Loder Reviews Citizenfour

In January
2013, Laura Poitras, an American documentary filmmaker, was drawn
into a heavily encrypted email correspondence with a person using
the name “citizenfour.” Poitras’ area of journalistic enterprise
was U.S. government behavior in the wake of 9/11. Her 2006
film, My Country, My Country, had won her both an
Oscar nomination and, she said, a place on a Department of Homeland
Security watch list. “Citizenfour” was appreciatively aware of
this, and he had a new story he wanted her to tell. He claimed that
America’s National Security Agency, already suspected to be out of
control, was engaged in a secret program of domestic surveillance
that was actually vast beyond the dreams of paranoia. “Which I can
prove,” he said. He had already been in contact with journalist
Glenn Greenwald. Now he wanted to rendezvous with Poitras and
Greenwald, face to face. In an anonymous hotel room in Hong Kong,
they met Edward Snowden, rogue NSA analyst, and became privy to his
hoard of downloaded secrets.

This eight-day debriefing now forms the bulk of Poitras’
bombshell documentary, Citizenfour. The director
began filming their hotel-room encounter right away, and part of
the film’s power is the fresh sense it conveys of a veil being
drawn back from our eyes to reveal a shocking new world. Snowden’s
revelations, which began appearing in
the Guardian and the Washington
Post in June of 2013, are now dismally familiar. But
here, along with Poitras and Greenwald, we’re hearing them related
for the first time, and they still astonish, writes Kurt
Loder. 

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