Citizenfour (Laura Poitras 2014)
Sunday 13th December 2015
We are showing a remarkable documentary about Edward Snowden and his revelations of the extensive secret surveillance carried out by the British and American intelligence services. Snowden released many classified documents that documented how these agencies have been collecting information about phone calls and emails made by millions of ordinary citizens like you and me. But, as the German Chancellor Angela Merkel unhappily discovered, even personal phone calls made by the most senior leaders of friendly nations have been illegally tapped, recorded and archived.
The film is entitled Citizenfour, the alias Snowden used in his first contacts with Laura Poitras and the journalists with whom she worked. The film has won many awards, including, in 2015, the Bafta and Oscar awards for Best Documentary Feature.
Here is an extract from the review of the film on the excellent Roger Ebert website:
‘… perhaps more than any documentary in history, [Citizenfour] invites endless questions about what [the director] chose to put in and leave out, to emphasise and to elide. But such debates are only a secondary – if very fascinating – aspect of a broader national and international discussion that the film deserves to start. They do nothing to diminish its colossal importance. Indeed, no film has ever been historic in quite the way this one is, since it tells a story in which the filmmaker and her work play a crucial part. It’s as if Daniel Ellsberg had a friend with a movie camera who filmed his disclosure of the Pentagon Papers every step of the way. Or if the Watergate burglars had taken along a filmmaker who shot their crimes and the cover-up that followed. Except that the issues Citizenfour deals with are, arguably, a thousand times more potent than Vietnam or Watergate.’
It may be just a coincidence that I am sending out this invitation on the day our very own Mrs May announced her plans for the nation’s future security. While one critic recommends you ‘Buy a ticket to this film… and use your credit card, so the NSA knows you care about this stuff,’ for us the screening is just a seasonal gift, and I do hope you can come. Nevertheless, since the invitation is coming to you by email, who knows who else may have already read it, even though they weren’t invited?
