Newspaper Movie: Citizenfour
As a newspaper obsessive, I’ve been compiling a list of films set in newspapers, you can find the others here. If you have a newspaper-related movie to recommend, that I’ve missed, please let me know.
CITIZENFOUR (2014)
Rating: 4.0 stars
Newsroom quotient: 1
Rolling presses vibe: 3
Newspaper featured: The Guardian
Newsroom used for filming: none
It takes incredible bravery to leave a long-term relationship, your job, to leave your whole life behind, knowing that you can never return. Making that decision at 29, standing up for the rights of others shows the kind of man Edward Snowden is.
Citizenfour starts with Snowden contacting filmmaker Laura Poitras anonymously by encrypted e-mail. Poitras has been working for several years on a film about monitoring programs in the United States. Snowden had been trying, unsuccessfully, to contact the journalist Glen Greenwald. He knew that Poitras and Greenwald had worked together in the past and suggested they could collaborate on the project.
Snowden realised the sheer volume of data he proposed to reveal was too great for a lone filmmaker. Greenwald was working for The Guardian, who had recently been involved in the vast Wikileaks data dump and knew how to secure the data Snowden was planning to hand over.
When we first see Snowden, he’s in a small Hong Kong hotel room, having walked away from his job with the NSA in Hawaii. This scene is the backdrop for the majority of the film.
When an NSA contractor fails to show up for work, it doesn’t go unnoticed for long. Once Greenwald starts publishing articles and appearing on the TV, it’s likely that the US authorities already know where they are. Snowden is brave, but he isn’t Jason Bourne. So when he and Greenwald discuss the prospect of the CIA kicking down the door, the hotel room suddenly feels less like a place of safety and more like a prison cell.
Poitras is an accomplished filmmaker who avoids the technical explanations becoming an impenetrable forest of jargon. Although much of the film is necessarily confined inside a small hotel room, by cutting in other footage of investigations into the NSA, she keeps the viewer engaged.
One of the more bizarre moments is the sight of Guardian journalists physically destroying the hard disks of computers containing some of the Snowden files under the watchful eyes of GCHQ. The UK Government insisted on this step, although The Guardian had already confirmed other copies of the files existed.
Citizenfour won both the 2015 BAFTA and Oscar for Best Documentary film, plus a string of other awards. The Guardian and The Washington Post received the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for Poitras, Greenwald, MacAskill, and Barton Gellman.
You can read original reporting by Glen Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill on The Guardian website.
Citizenfour is available to stream from Amazon Prime.
