Citizenfour (M). Director: Laura Poitras. Starring: Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald, William Binney, Ewen MacAskill. 114 minutes
This is not just a documentary. It is history in the making. The revelations made by Edward Snowden in Citizenfour, about the extent to which ordinary American and British citizens' privacy had been invaded by the data-mining activities of their own governments, is part of the public record. Laura Poitras' Oscar-winning documentary is as much a portrait of the process that led to the historical revelations, and of the manner and motivations of the whistleblower, as it is a record of their content.
Documentarian Poitras and The Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald were handpicked by Snowden to be the mediators of his revelations, due to their work exposing government abuses of civil liberties in post-9/11 America. They met with him in a Hong Kong hotel in early 2013, coaxed by a series of encrypted emails from an individual who identified himself as citizenfour. The early part of the film uses the content of these email exchanges to mount considerable suspense in the lead-up to the first meeting. Citizenfour is every inch a real-life spy thriller.
When they, and we, finally meet him, Snowden proves to be both passionate and highly articulate. He is a systems analyst working at the National Security Agency, who wants nothing less noble than to see the delineation between those with power and the people over whom they wield it redrawn, to reflect the rightful distinction between elected and electors, rather than rulers and the ruled. In this, he is far from gung-ho; he is loath to let his own biases dictate the release of the information, and so he puts his trust in the journalistic process, and in the ethical allies he has identified in his chosen gatekeepers.
Poitras' camera captures in real-time Snowden's rivetting revelations, his strategising with Greenwald as to how and when the information is to be disseminated, and his reactions, as the stories that he has initiated begin to filter into the public domain. This is a compelling insight into the journalistic process, from the inception of the story to its development, publication, and public reaction to it. Snowden wants the revelation of his identity to be carefully controlled; the media is too personality-driven, he believes, and he wants as much as possible for the content of his revelations, and not himself, to be the story.
In this Snowden is both heroic and