Edward Snowden and girlfriend reunited in Moscow, documentary reveals

The new documenary about Edward Snowden will open in the US later this month. Photograph: The Guardian/EPA

Edward Snowden, the former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor who blew the whistle on the US governments mass surveillance programs, has been reunited in Russia with his long-time girlfriend, according to a new documentary shown on Friday.

Lindsay Mills, a dancer who was living with Snowden when he left Hawaii for Hong Kong in May 2013, joined him in Moscow in July 2014, the documentary disclosed.

The two are filmed cooking together in an apartment in Moscow, where Snowden (31), has been living since he was given temporary asylum and later a three-year residency permit.

Ms Mills had remained silent and her whereabouts were largely unknown after Snowdens release of tens of thousands of classified US intelligence documents in 2013.

Citizenfour, made by US film maker Laura Poitras, who shared a Pulitzer Prize this year for her role in publicising the Snowden documents, had its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on Friday.

It gives a fly-on-the wall account of Snowdens tense days in a Hong Kong hotel and his encounters with journalists from the Washington Post and Britains Guardian newspaper as they prepared to divulge details of NSA programmes that gathered data from the Internet activities and the phones of millions of ordinary citizens and dozens of world leaders.

Citizenfour takes its title from the email alias that Snowden used when he first approached Poitras in early 2013 through a series of encrypted emails with a view to leaking details of the top-secret programmes to the media.

Marketed as a real-life thriller, it is the first of several major films in the works about Snowden, who is wanted by the United States on charges brought under the Espionage Act.

I already know how this will end for me, and I accept the risk, an outwardly calm Snowden says.

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Edward Snowden and girlfriend reunited in Moscow, documentary reveals