The Best Part Of 'Citizenfour': Snowden's Coming Out Week

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Dima007

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Many rave reviews of Laura Poitras’s new documentary ‘Citizenfour’ have already been written. The film tackles the large and difficult subject of government information collection, which can no longer be easily referred to as the “sprawling surveillance state” because it involves so many different states, often acting in concert. Documentaries on the subject — such as PBS Frontline’s recent United States of Secrets — usually involve a series of interviews with people staring into the camera and telling you what they know. But that is not the Poitras style. She seeks to capture events as they happen rather than interviews, so her film features Congressional testimony, a speech at a hacker conference, arguments before a federal court about warrantless wiretapping, journalist Glenn Greenwald typing away in Brazil surrounded by his famous dogs, and the active construction site for the NSA’s famous datacenter in Utah. But as the New Yorker’s George Packer notes in his profile of Poitras, “the heart of the film is the hotel room in Hong Kong.” That would be the hotel room where NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden holed up for a week last year with Poitras, Greenwald, and Guardian journalist Ewen MacAskill and started the leak that launched a global debate about the intelligence community’s information binging in the digital age.

It is incredible that this historic week is captured on film. It is as if the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward were accompanied by a cameraman for his meetings with Deep Throat, or Daniel Ellsberg tailed by a reality TV film crew as he made the momentous decision to share the Pentagon Papers with the press. Not only is the week captured, it is captured in minute and humanizing detail…. Such close detail that one of my viewing companions suggested Snowden visit the dermatologist as he worried about some of his moles. It gives the TV show Big Brother a serious run for its money. The three participants (plus Laura Poitras, off screen) bond. Snowden’s hotel room steadily gets messier. You see the famous Tor and EFF stickers on Snowden’s laptop, but also that he has a copy of Cory Doctorow’s Homeland in the room — a meta touch given that the novel is about a protagonist with a thumbdrive of incriminating government documents who is trying to decide how to leak them. Everyone starts making more jokes as they get more comfortable with one another, even as the bags under Snowden’s eyes get darker as the stories he unleashed — and his identity — go viral. Poitras films Snowden at length simply watching the news, as anchors and experts debate the meaning of the government programs revealed — such as the mass collection of telephone metadata — and Snowden’s own motivations. It is riveting.

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Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald at the Mira in Hong Kong. A historic week, captured on film.

It is also hilarious at times. Snowden was convinced of the danger of his coming forward. “I appreciate your concern for my safety, but I already know how this will end for me and I accept the risk…. I ask only that you ensure this information makes it home to the American public,” he wrote in an email to Poitras before meeting her, when he signed his emails only as ‘Citizenfour.’ It was a serious enterprise, and Snowden was convinced of dire results for him, but the tension was lifted by moments of levity. At one point, a fire alarm keeps going off, interrupting their discussions of intelligence programs, awakening first paranoia — is someone trying to interrupt their session? — and then, after a call to the front desk that reveals it’s maintenance, simple annoyance.

Read more: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmir...-part-of-the-snowden-documentary-citizenfour/
 
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