Citizenfour

Citizenfour is part three of Laura Poitras” trilogy about post-9/11 America. Following on My Country, My Country (2006) on the war in Iraq and The Oath (2010) on the detention of alleged terrorists in Guantanamo Bay, the third part was set up as a record of surveillance abuse by US security and intelligence agencies. Poitras had already been working on the film for a few years when she received encrypted emails by an anonymous source in January 2013. This “Citizen Four” claimed he was able to offer evidence of large-scale illegal wiretapping by the National Security Agency (NSA) in cooperation with a number of foreign intelligence agencies.

Five months later, Poitras flew to Hong Kong together with Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill of The Guardian, where she started filming the conversations with the man who later revealed himself as Edward Snowden. Citizenfour is not just a detailed eye-witness account of these talks and the atmosphere in Snowden”s hotel room, it also shows the far-reaching consequences of his revelations and the responses by the outside world. The film is above all an uncompromising documentary thriller about one of the most sensational scandals of the past decade, the scale of which is not yet fully clear to this day.