It’s difficult to critically engage with Citizenfour, as Poitras’ landmark documentary about Edward Snowden isn’t a film so much as a big fucking deal. A primary account of how the world learned that the NSA has been spying on United States citizens, and also a meta-text that implicitly validates the information it uncovers, Citizenfour offers a remarkably intimate look at history as it happened. One day in early 2013, Poitras received an encrypted email. Less than six months later, she flew to Hong Kong to meet the source, who until that point had identified himself only by his web handle: ‘Citizenfour.’ This cryptic exchange snakes its way through the first act of the film, which plays out with the thick paranoid tension of The Conversation. With great skill, Citizenfour eventually becomes more of a window into the violation of civil liberties than it does a mirror of the people who helped bring them to light, but the real and phenomenally rich human drama helps catalyze the film’s whistleblowing polemic, which includes a ‘bombshell’ announcement nested in its final scene. DE
Section: PanoramaD: Laura Poitras
F: Laura Poitras, Kirsten Johnson, Katy Scoggin, Trevor Paglen
E: Mathilde Bonnefoy
P: Laura Poitras, Mathilde Bonnefoy, Dirk Wilutzky
CP: Praxis Films Berlin, Praxis Films
CAT&Docs. Maëlle Guenegues
T +33 1 4461 7748 E maelle@catndocs.com
W catndocs.com - citizenfourfilm.com TW @citizenfour
She’s an artist and journalist born in Boston, USA, in 1964. She directed several documentaries, including My Country, My Country (2006) and The Oath (2010). In 2014 she received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and in 2015 she won an Oscar for Best Documentary with Citizenfour.
05 May 2015
25 April 2015
25 April 2015
