Radius-TWC and Participant Media have released the first trailer for Laura Poitras’ new documentary Citizenfour.
The film focuses on Edward Snowden and the NSA leak, and features first-hand footage of the documentarian as she and a reporter travel to Hong Kong for the first of many meetings with Snowden.
The film is getting major awards buzz after premiering at the New York Film Festival earlier this month, and is executive produced by Steven Soderbergh.
Citizenfour is out in the US on October 24th.
Citizenfour is the never before seen, utterly riveting first-person look at how director Laura 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. It is an unprecedented fly-on-the-wall account of one of the most groundbreaking moments in recent history.
In January 2013, 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 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.