Citizenfour

In January 2013, filmmaker Laura Poitras began receiving encrypted emails from an anonymous source using the name Citizenfour, who claimed to hold evidence of secret mass surveillance programs run by the NSA with other intelligence agencies. Months later, Poitras and journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill traveled to Hong Kong for the first of several meetings with the person behind the messages, who turned out to be former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden. Poitras brought her camera along, filming the conversations as Snowden's identity and the documents he disclosed became public. The film stays inside the rooms where these exchanges took place, following the people involved rather than reconstructing events afterward.

Citizenfour is a documentary directed by Poitras, who also wrote the screenplay and produced it with Mathilde Bonnefoy and Dirk Wilutzky. It was made in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, with Participant, NDR, BR and HBO Documentary Films among its backers. On screen, Snowden, Greenwald, Poitras, William Binney, Barack Obama and Jacob Appelbaum all appear as themselves. The film earned a worldwide box office of about 3 million dollars.

It holds 8/10 on IMDb from 60,000 votes and 7.7/10 on TMDB, while a critics' rating stands at 8.3/10 from 143 reviews. Citizenfour was Poitras's first directed feature in the chronological list of her films, ahead of All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Cover-Up and They're Here.