Citizenfour

Friday afternoon I was at one of the 1st screenings of Citizenfour, an unnerving documentary by Laura Poitras about the NSA leaks. Ms. Poitras was one of the journalists contacted by Edward Snowden & who met him in his Hong Kong hotel room last June, along with Guardian reporters Glenn Greenwald & Ewen MacAskill. The centerpiece of the film is jolting footage of those meetings, capturing the tense, business-like, yet intimate, atmosphere. Snowden himself is a fascinating subject: sleek, calm & clear-minded. He's so paranoid that he covers himself with a blanket when typing sensitive passwords into his laptop. We get amusing glimpses of him primping as he prepares to leave his room after the leaks have gone public.

The movie includes commentary from government spying critics Willian Binney & Jacob Appelbaum, who is to the point when he observes that we now discuss "privacy" instead of "liberty." Julian Assange makes a curious cameo appearance, apparently trying to aid Snowden's transit through Russia. We also see some of the international fallout of the leaks. There's disconcerting video of editors at The Guardian fretting over what to report about the UK's GCHQ information gathering program, which is much more comprehensive than the US's. In a grisly basement operation, Guardian editors eventually destroy the hard drives containing the incriminating documents. An epilogue shows Glenn Greenwald chatting with Snowden in Moscow & passing him scribbled notes about revelations from a 2nd NSA leaker. The film is scary.

Citizenfour opens in San Francisco & Albany on October 24th & in San Rafael on October 31st.

§ Citizenfour (2014)
dir. Laura Poitras, USA, 114 min