Edward Snowden at source – BBC

CINEMA – The film won the Oscar for best documentary film traces the whistleblower revelations on the NSA eavesdropping

Edward Snowden again about him these days. US whistleblower from political refuge in Moscow, provided documents to the website The Intercept showing that the American and British intelligence stole the encryption key Gemalto, the world leader SIM cards. New evidence of mass surveillance of peoples by democratic governments.

Snowden is not his first attempt. In 2013, he triggered a political scandal by revealing defense secret NSA documents (National Secret Agency). It does so through Glenn Greenwald, a journalist with Guardian , and Laura Poitras, American documentary filmmaker noted for his films on post-September 11 America. My Country, My Country (2007) deals with the intervention in Iraq. The Oath (2010) is dedicated to Guantanamo. Citizenfour will be the last of a trilogy dedicated to the United States after the Patriot Act. “Citizenfour” is the pseudonym under which Snowden contact by email late 2012, early 2013 Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. The documentary films encrypted pages of their correspondence. In some sequences, the director installs an atmosphere worthy of paranoid thrillers of Alan J. Pakula policies ( People President , The Parallax View ). There has, for example, an Occupy Wall Street meeting; Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill explained to participants how the intelligence services get metadata about people’s lives (retinal scans, fingerprinting).

This past prologue, we enter into the heart the subject, or the meeting between Snowden and Greenwald, filmed by Laura Poitras. The three were soon joined by Ewen MacAskill, the correspondent of Guardian specializes in defense and intelligence, are in a Hong Kong hotel. The “deep throat” Laura Poitras is a blond man wearing a T-shirt. American geek glasses of 29 who remembers the Internet before tapping as a lost paradise where “anywhere in the world, children could discuss as equals, with the assurance that we respect their ideas with experts at the other end of the world, any topic, anywhere, anytime. Totally free way. ” Officially “infrastructure analyst,” the agent of the NSA has always concealed his real activities with the surroundings. He waited for his girlfriend, Lindsay, whether on vacation to disappear, leaving a note saying he was traveling for work. It is she who will receive the Oscar with the director.

Citizenfour does not contain scoops but captures all the emotions of a man at a critical point in its existence . Determination, doubt, fear. Through its trade with Greenwald, we discover some of the personality of the man whose face once the scandal disclosed, appears on the big screens in the streets of Hong Kong and on the whole world. One of the last sequences shows Snowden and his partner met in Moscow, preparing to eat. It’s like a novel by John Le Carré.