Citizenfour

Director: Laura Poitras
Cast: Edward Snowden, Julian Assange
Length: 114 minutes
Country: USA

Director Laura Poitras opens her film with a title card explaining that Citizenfour is the final film in a trilogy about post 9/11 America. The first, The Oath, explored the life of two taxi drivers with links to al-Qaeda undergoing US military tribunals. The second, My Country, My Country, detailed the lives of average Iraqi citizens during the US occupation of Iraq. Finally, with Citizenfour, Poitras paints the finishing chilling touches to her canvas with the reveal of global surveillance disclosures headed up by the United States National Security Agency (NSA). The film enthrallingly chronicles the early stages for Edward Snowden, the man at the epicentre of this debacle.

In April 2012 ex-NSA employee Edward Snowden began downloading the documents he planned to leak. Shortly afterwards he contacted Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald and documentarian Laura Poitras. In May 2013, Snowden, Greenwald, Poitras and the Guardian’s defence and intelligence correspondent Ewen MacAskill, met up in Hong Kong. The two hour documentary shows us never-before-seen footage of their questions and his answers in a quiet hotel room. Laura Poitras keeps herself out of the spotlight, so instead we watch each moment unfold through her camera lens – her eyes. We see their ongoing communication both before, during and after Hong Kong, where he’s stuck seeking asylum in Russia. The effects of his actions are incredibly widespread, being featured in every world-wide news medium and Citizenfour tells the tale as it happened from day zero.

Framed like any other top-rate political thriller, Laura Poitras narrates her film with a cold touch – it proves particularly useful in not hiding Snowden’s vulnerability. The film slyly paints a portrait a man some consider a traitor and others a patriot. There’s a specific discussion in the film in which he highlights that he doesn’t want to be primary subject of these revelations. But now over a year on, Poitras feels it’s time to display the man she sees undeniable courage in. Snowden’s plan to get the documents to the public was well-thought out – he understood completely the consequences of his actions and communicates the nature of spying scandal ever so intelligently and eloquently. At first there’s only indiscernible fear in his voice, but when the reality of his situation hits further than the tv screen – his home – it’s easy to see Poitras towering respect for his fortitude.

A crucial piece of documentary filmmaking – Citizenfour presents a partially biased but well informed view of the inception and immediate reaction of the NSA spying scandal.

As a documentary, Citizenfour is almost too unnerving, so much so that the film seamlessly scatters moments of humour throughout – some rather bizarre, some bureaucratic buffoonery, and others products of Snowden’s paranoia. It’s a welcome retreat from the haunting sights of digitally-alive cityscapes around the world, scored to the dark and ambient tunes of Nine-Inch Nails’ Ghost I-IV – as if the paranoia isn’t seeping into our brains already. Poitras occasionally pulls the focus away from the claustrophobic hotel room and illustrates the efforts of other freedom fighters like William Binney, Jacob Appelbaum and Julian Assange. Amidst the increasingly tech-heavy discussion of metadata, PRISM, GCHQ etc. the camera often lingers on Snowden lifelessly staring into his laptop screen, coalescing his sense of isolation with the inevitable chaos.

A crucial piece of documentary filmmaking – Citizenfour presents a partially biased but well informed view of the inception and immediate reaction of the NSA spying scandal. The film isn’t so much an all encapsulating discussion of civil liberties as much it it a parable of one man’s attempt to fight against an increasingly authoritarian state. Shunned by the very government he once served, Edward Snowden’s face now carries the weight of a billion angry voices – so it’s satisfying to see that Poitras, one definitely in that number, does an adept job of turning his story into captivating cinema.

Header Image Source: Artificial Eye