NYFF 2014: Edward Snowden documentary ‘Citizenfour’ jolts …

Many documentaries seek to kick-start environmental movements, reverse death row sentences or even change legislative policy.

But few come with the kind of ideological ambition of the Edward Snowden study "Citizenfour," a movie of grand scope that also tells an intimate personal story.

The long-awaited documentary from Snowden chronicler Laura Poitras arrived with a bang at its world premiere at the New York Film Festival on Friday night, receiving a rare festival standing ovation ahead of its theatrical release Oct. 24, when it could well jolt both the fall moviegoing season and the national conversation about privacy and security.

Poitras, as some may recall, shot the 12-minute video of Snowden that went viral in June 2013 and made the National Security Agency contractor, at 29, perhaps the most important and polarizing figure since Daniel Ellsberg. "Citizenfour is, in effect, that original video effort writ very large a look at how Snowden came to the decision to pull back the curtain on the NSA's massive surveillance operation and what happened to him when he did.

It is also, needless to say, a portrait of that operation itself.

Its absolutely staggering and beyond what you can ever imagine, Poitras said in an interview at the festival Saturday. Theres the scope and desire of collecting all of this data, and also the mentality that if they have all communications they have these repositories they can query later. Its shocking, really.

Poitras is already well known as a foreign-affairs investigative journalist thanks to documentaries such as her Oscar-nominated My Country, My Country. Her new film begins with her voiceover describing how she had been contacted anonymously by a man identifying himself as "Citizenfour" who claimed to have proof of illegal government surveillance.

The source turns out to be Snowden, but before Poitras gets to him, she details the extensive national security apparatus that he will soon expose. The director has activists explain how the government uses so-called metadata to track phone calls and movements of ordinary citizens, and shows clips of James Clapper, director of national intelligence for the NSA, testifying before Congress that the government does not spy on millions of Americans.

The focus then shifts to Snowden, shot by Poitras over eight days in a now-famous Hong Kong hotel room with the Guardians Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill present, ready to break stories based on the classified documents Snowden is leaking them. (Greenwald would eventually write a book on the experience called No Place To Hide.) There is a kind of unfettered, up-close detail to these scenes that would be startling for any interesting documentary subject, let alone for the worlds most famous fugitive. "Citizenfour" is an examination of a larger-than-life personality in the most handmade manner imaginable.

Snowden has made the decision to come forward, he says in the film, because he feels theres a great threat to the future of American free speech. "The elected and the electorate," Snowden says, have become "the ruler and the ruled.

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NYFF 2014: Edward Snowden documentary 'Citizenfour' jolts ...