Citizenfour

Citizenfour
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Laura Poitras
Produced by	Laura Poitras Mathilde Bonnefoy Dirk Wilutzky
Starring	Edward Snowden Glenn Greenwald William Binney Jacob Appelbaum Ewen MacAskill
Cinematography	Kirsten Johnson Katy Scoggin Trevor Paglen
Edited by	Mathilde Bonnefoy
Production companies	Praxis Films Participant Media HBO Films
Distributed by	Radius-TWC
Release dates	October 10, 2014 (2014-10-10) (New York Film Festival) October 24, 2014 (2014-10-24) (United States)
Running time	114 minutes
Countries	United States Germany
Languages	English German Portuguese
Box office	$2,622,499

Shot from the film trailer for Citizenfour

Citizenfour is a 2014 documentary film directed by Laura Poitras concerning Edward Snowden and the NSA spying scandal. Shot in the cinéma vérité style, the film had its U.S. premiere on October 10, 2014 at the New York Film Festival and its UK premiere on October 17, 2014 at the BFI London Film Festival. The film features Glenn Greenwald and was co-produced by Laura Poitras, Mathilde Bonnefoy, and Dirk Wilutzky, with Steven Soderbergh and others serving as executive producers.

Background

In January 2013, Laura Poitras received an encrypted e-mail from a stranger who called himself Citizen Four. In it, he offered her inside information about illegal wiretapping practices of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. Poitras had already been working for several years on a film about monitoring programs in the US, the result of the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001. In June 2013, accompanied by investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald and The Guardian intelligence reporter Ewen MacAskill, she went to Hong Kong with her camera for the first meeting with the stranger, who identified himself as Edward Snowden. Several other meetings followed. The recordings gained from this form the basis of the film.

Cast

• Jacob Appelbaum
• Julian Assange
• William Binney
• Glenn Greenwald
• Ladar Levison
• Ewen MacAskill
• Laura Poitras
• Jeremy Scahill
• Edward Snowden

Production

By 2012, Laura Poitras had begun work on the third film in her 9/11 trilogy which she intended to focus broadly on the topic of domestic surveillance for which she interviewed Julian Assange, Glenn Greenwald, William Binney and Jacob Appelbaum. She was first contacted by Edward Snowden in January 2013 after he was unable to establish encrypted communications with Greenwald. She flew to Hong Kong in late May 2013, where over the course of eight days she filmed Snowden in his hotel room at the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong. Later, she traveled to Moscow where she filmed a second interview with Snowden conducted by Greenwald.

Production company Praxis Films was involved in the production of the documentary. The film was distributed by RADIUS TWC in the US, Britdoc Foundation and Artificial Eye in the UK and Piffl Media in Germany. The broadcast rights for television were obtained by Channel 4 (United Kingdom), HBO Documentary Films (USA) and Norddeutscher Rundfunk (Germany).

Release

The international film premiere took place on October 10, 2014 in the United States at the New York Film Festival. In Europe, the documentary was shown for the first time on October 17 at the London Film Festival. The first showing in Germany was on October 27 as part of the Leipzig Film Festival. The director Laura Poitras was present in Hamburg Abaton cinema for a preview on November 4–5 at the official Germany Premiere at Kino International. In German cinemas, the film has been running since November 6. Its widest release as of January 22, 2015 was 105 theaters, in the weekend of December 12–18, 2014.

Reception

Citizenfour received widespread critical acclaim. It has a 97% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 118 critics, with an average score of 8.3/10. Metacritic gave the film an 88 out of 100 based on a normalized rating of 34 reviews.

Ronnie Scheib of Variety wrote "No amount of familiarity with whistleblower Edward Snowden and his shocking revelations of the U.S. government’s wholesale spying on its own citizens can prepare one for the impact of Laura Poitras’s extraordinary documentary Citizenfour... far from reconstructing or analyzing a fait accompli, the film tersely records the deed in real time, as Poitras and fellow journalist Glenn Greenwald meet Snowden over an eight-day period in a Hong Kong hotel room to plot how and when they will unleash the bombshell that shook the world. Adapting the cold language of data encryption to recount a dramatic saga of abuse of power and justified paranoia, Poitras brilliantly demonstrates that information is a weapon that cuts both ways."

Spencer Ackerman writes in The Guardian: "Citizenfour must have been a maddening documentary to film. Its subject is pervasive global surveillance, an enveloping digital act that spreads without visibility, so its scenes unfold in courtrooms, hearing chambers and hotels. Yet the virtuosity of Laura Poitras, its director and architect, makes its 114 minutes crackle with the nervous energy of revelation."

Time magazine rated the film #8 out of its top 10 movies of 2014 and called the film "This Halloween's Scariest Chiller". Vanity Fair rated it #4 out of its top 10 and Grantland rated it #3 of its top 10. The Chicago Tribune ran a negative review, calling Snowden "more narcissist than patriot". David Edelstein reviewed the film mostly favorably, and jocularly advised viewers "don't buy your ticket online or with a credit card".

The film site Fandor has published an extensive survey of other articles and reviews about Citizenfour, updated through 12/25/2014.

Lawsuit

In December 2014, retired naval officer and oil executive Horace Edwards of Kansas filed suit against the film's producers "on behalf of the American people" for aiding and abetting Snowden's leaks. The Hollywood Reporter provided some legal analysis, noting observers opining that Edwards may not have legal standing to pursue the lawsuit. Edwards also challenged the film's Oscar eligibility on the grounds that Poitras's 2013 short film showing Greenwald interviewing Snowden constituted a previous release of Citizenfour, rendering it ineligible under Oscar rules. The Academy rejected the claim, noting that "the Guardian interview appears in less than two minutes of the documentary", and ruled that Citzenfour is eligible for Oscar consideration.

Awards and nominations

Citizenfour won the 2014 Gotham Independent Film Award for Best Documentary and the International Documentary Association award for best documentary feature. It received four Cinema Eye Honors (Outstanding Achievements in Nonfiction Filmmaking (to the film), Direction (to Poitras), Editing (to Mathilde Bonnefoy), and Production (to Poitras, Bonnefoy, and Dirk Wilutzky). At DOK Leipzig 2014, it won the Leipziger Ring award and Edward Snowden gave a video message to the festival. The film also won the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary

Citienfour is a nominee for the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and is considered a front-runner for that award. and Laura Poitras is nominated for the Directors Guild of America award for best documentary (winner to be announced February 6). Brent Lang of Variety called for Citizenfour to receive a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Picture, but it was not nominated in that category.

Security

Poitras took many security precautions related to the film, described by military writer Peter Maass among others. She moved to Berlin, Germany after being detained repeatedly at border controls when entering the US. She edited the film in Germany after flying directly there from Hong Kong with the Snowden footage, to prevent the FBI from showing up with a search warrant for her hard drives. All the film footage is kept on encrypted drives with multiple levels of nested protection. The computer she uses for reading sensitive documents is separated from the internet by an air gap. Greenwald credited her with a "complete expert level of understanding of how to do a story like this with total technical and operational safety." Maass called Poitras' security skills "particularly vital — and far from the journalistic norm — in an era of pervasive government spying", and quotes Snowden stating that "[i]n the wake of this year's disclosure, it should be clear that unencrypted journalist-source communication is unforgivably reckless."

Mathilde Bonnefoy has also discussed the encrypted workflow used in making the film, adding "if we have a conversation that’s particularly confidential, we’ll move the electronics out of the room, or we’ll just meet somewhere outside of the editing room, without our phones."

The Film Society of Lincoln Center (which selects films for the New York Film Festival) reported that Poitras changed the location of the initial screening for the NYFF's selection committee several times, in case someone was tracking her movements. The committee was shown a rough cut that had sensitive material redacted, and the NYFF "had to keep the movie’s inclusion in the festival under wraps until mid-September" and it was "kept out of festival schedules and documents until we could talk about it openly". The last-minute inclusion in the festival's main slate was an unprecedented event for the NYFF, and "tickets for both screenings sold out within just a few hours".

The film's ending credits unusually name several free software projects and security tools, without which "this film would not be possible". The programs named include Tor, Tails, Debian GNU/Linux, Off-the-record messaging, the GNU Privacy Guard, Truecrypt, and SecureDrop. In October 2014, the Electronic Frontier Foundation published an informational page about the software credited in the film.

Soundtrack

The soundtrack consists of portions of the Nine Inch Nails album Ghosts I–IV.

Related films

• Oliver Stone is working on a dramatization with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Ed Snowden, based on Guardian journalist Luke Harding's book The Snowden Files, and on the fictionalized Time of the Octopus by Snowden's Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherina. Shooting is scheduled for Munich in early 2015.
• The Program, Laura Poitras's film about NSA whistleblower William Binney referenced in Citizenfour, was released as a New York Times "op-doc" (combination of a written op-ed article and a short documentary film) on August 22, 2012 and is on the NYT web site.
• Poitras's film of the 12.5 minute Greenwald–Snowden interview released during the Hong Kong meeting in Citizenfour was posted to The Guardian's web site on June 9, 2013.
• A 58-minute Danish documentary Snowdens store flugt (Snowden's big escape), about Snowden's Wikileaks-assisted exfiltration from Hong Kong to Moscow following the events of Citizenfour, was shown on DR1 on 13 January 2015 and can be seen on DR's web site until 12 February 2015. The narration is in Danish but most of the interviews are in English.
• Sony Pictures has taken an option to make a movie of Greenwald's book No Place to Hide.
• Laura Poitras has mentioned plans for another film, using footage cut from Citizenfour after the appearance of Edward Snowden, focusing on the work of Julian Assange.

See also

• List of films featuring surveillance
• Previous films in trilogy: My Country, My Country (2006) and The Oath (2010)
• No Place to Hide, book by Glenn Greenwald about the Snowden disclosures, including the events depicted in the film.

External links

• Official website
• Citizenfour at IMDb
• Citizenfour at AllMovie
• Citizenfour at Box Office Mojo
• Citizenfour at Metacritic
• Citizenfour at Rotten Tomatoes