Laura Poitras‘ documentary Citizenfour will play the New York Film Festival today and ahead of that premiere the first trailer has arrived via HuffPo.
The doc offers up a first-person look at how Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald first met with whistleblower Edward Snowden in Hong Kong where he gave them documents showing widespread abuses of power by the National Security Administration. Here’s the official, full synopsis:
In January 2013, filmmaker Laura Poitras (recipient of the 2012 MacArthur Genius Fellowship and co-recipient of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service) was several years into making a film about surveillance in the post-9/11 era when she started receiving encrypted e-mails from someone identifying himself as “citizen four,” who was ready to blow the whistle on the massive covert surveillance programs run by the NSA and other intelligence agencies. In June 2013, she and Greenwald flew to Hong Kong for the first of many meetings with the man who turned out to be Edward Snowden. She brought her camera with her. The film that resulted from this series of tense encounters is absolutely sui generis in the history of cinema: a 100% real-life thriller unfolding minute by minute before our eyes.
I expect to see this one soon as it arrives in Seattle theaters on October 31 and I’m quite curious to check it out, far more than any of the Snowden dramatizations being cooked up, particularly the one from Oliver Stone.
Watch the Citizenfour trailer below.
