Citizenfour (2014)

Official trailer

Citizenfour is Laura Poitras’s 2014 American documentary depicting Edward Snowden’s June 2013 meetings with Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald in Hong Kong, when Snowden disclosed classified National Security Agency documents revealing extensive surveillance programs.

The production combines real-time footage of these meetings with later material covering the disclosure’s consequences. HBO Documentary Films and Praxis Films produced the film. The production won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Citizenfour plays like a thriller to me, and nothing in it is staged. The Hong Kong scenes wind me tighter than most fiction does, even though I know how the story comes out. My one reservation is the later material covering the fallout, which never matches the charge of those meetings.

Citizenfour shows how documentary can work as journalism in real time, capturing events of historical consequence as they unfold. The film depends on Poitras having direct access to her subject during the disclosure itself. Snowden’s decision-making and personality emerge across the film’s main sequence, and Poitras keeps an observational presence that turns those meetings into a documentary record. Later journalism documentaries built on the model it set.

The Real-Time Approach

Citizenfour builds on real-time footage of Snowden’s Hong Kong meetings with Poitras and Greenwald as the film’s primary content. It relies on direct access that after-the-fact reconstruction couldn’t provide, and it produces a record of historical events as they occurred.

The footage captures Snowden’s preparation, the first review of the documents, and the journalists working out what the material means. I find those scenes gripping because nothing happens in them except people talking and thinking, and Poitras trusts that to sustain the film. It shows how investigative journalism works at major scale, and other filmmakers have followed the template since.

Snowden Portrait

Citizenfour builds its portrait of Snowden out of the Hong Kong footage, catching his deliberation and personality across the disclosure period. Extended observation gets at things an interview-based documentary couldn’t reach, and I came away feeling I understood him better than any sit-down interview could have managed.

The footage shows Snowden’s preparation for public disclosure, including his concern about distinguishing the real content from his own person. The approach reveals how the subject understood the journalistic process he was initiating. It set the template for the films that came after about whistleblowing.

What struck me most is how worried he is that the story will become about him. I think that concern, caught on camera before the public knew his name, is the reason the film hits as hard as it does.

The Surveillance Subject

Citizenfour makes surveillance its real subject through the disclosed documents and the journalists’ analysis of them. The specific material turns an abstract policy debate into concrete detail, which most policy documentaries never manage.

The production’s awareness that it’s a surveillance target runs through the whole film and shapes its approach. I love that paranoia. It gives even the quiet scenes a hum of dread, and it shows how a documentary can capture the conditions of its own making.

Is Citizenfour as good as people say?

Citizenfour gets a 9 from me because it caught history while it was happening and had the nerve to let the quiet moments play. It’s mandatory viewing for anyone who wants to see real-time journalism on film or to see what surveillance looks like from the inside. The later material about the fallout is the reason it isn’t a 10, since it can’t match the tension of those Hong Kong meetings.

Frequently Asked Questions