Greenwald, Poitras and Scahill are working with a new NSA whistleblower.

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.

...

“The film is made with enormous risks not just to myself,” she said, “but to Snowden, Glenn and William Binney [a former NSA worker who also appears] It’s easy to look at it in retrospect and say these stories and documents were going to get out, but there was a lot of fear and danger.”

The screws eventually do tighten on Snowden and he flees to Moscow, at which point his communication with Poitras reverts to encrypted emails, which Poitras shows on the screen, "War Games" style. (Apart from the quickest glimpse, Poitras herself is ‎never seen in the film.)

With its focus on the ability of muckrakers and whistle-blowers to bring down powerful institutions, the film comes in the tradition of “All the President’s Men” as well as more recent, techno-centric tales as the Aaron Swartz documentary “The Internet’s Own Boy.”

In the summer of 2004, Poitras went to Baghdad, and in the Green Zone she embedded with a civil-affairs unit responsible for helping Iraqi officials organize the country’s first democratic elections. She was on her own, without even a local interpreter, and she came to depend on the generosity of American soldiers, who gave her the key to a trailer where she could sleep and identity badges that allowed her to move freely. “I don’t go into films because I want to make an ideological or political point,” she told me in Berlin. “I have some themes I’m interested in, and I just begin—I go on a journey, I meet people, and through those people the questions are answered, but the questions kind of get handed over to the circumstances I’m documenting.” She added, “I was certainly against the war, but, actually being there, I had to understand it differently. It changed everything. It’s easy to say from New York that elections under occupation are a sham. But, when you actually see people who are willing to die to vote, it’s real.”


In Iraq, Poitras was frustrated to discover that the civil-affairs unit was largely confined to the Green Zone. Shortly after arriving, she went to film an inspection of Abu Ghraib prison, and there she met an Iraqi doctor named Riyadh al-Adhadh, who was taking down health complaints from prisoners. The doctor, a Sunni, was opposed to the American presence but determined to run for local office. Dr. Riyadh suggested that she come to his clinic and film his meetings with patients. When the hour grew too late for Poitras to return safely to her trailer, he invited her to stay at his house, where he lived with his wife and six children. Poitras had found her subject, and she lived with the family, on and off, for the next eight months, following them through daily life as the country staggered toward elections amid firefights, suicide bombings, and assassinations. Her technique is to hold the camera at waist height and look down into the viewfinder, rather than hide her face behind a lens. “The camera doesn’t have to be a barrier,” she said. “It’s a witness.” Although she understood little Arabic, and had to wait weeks or months to have footage translated, she had an instinct for moments of intimate drama, and her Iraqi subjects revealed their pain, their black humor, their fragile hope. The film, “My Country, My Country,” is a masterpiece of empathy. In Poitras’s telling, the Iraq War is a tragedy for all sides, and Dr. Riyadh emerges as a quiet hero struggling to preserve free will and decency against overwhelming forces. The film, which was nominated for an Academy Award, remains an essential document of the war. Seen today, it seems almost hopeful, showing an Iraq whose fate has not yet been sealed.

Poitras wanted to make her next film about the detention camps at Guantánamo, as the second part of a trilogy about American power after 9/11. Her idea was to find a prisoner who was innocent and follow him home after his release. She went to Yemen, the home country of many of the inmates. On her second day in the capital, Sanaa, she met a man named Nasser al-Bahri, who went by the nom de guerre Abu Jandal. He was the brother-in-law of Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s former driver and among Guantánamo’s best-known prisoners. Abu Jandal, a taxi-driver, had once been bin Laden’s bodyguard in Afghanistan. “My brain went in somersaults—how the fuck is this possible?” Poitras said. “How can somebody who was so high up in Al Qaeda be driving a taxicab in Sanaa, and we have documented cases of people who have no business being held at Guantánamo?” At first, she imagined making two films—one about an innocent prisoner, which “would be politically correct, an example of why Guantánamo should be closed,” and another telling a “much more messy story about an unreliable character.” Once again, circumstances on the ground led her away from her original conceit. She rented an apartment in Sanaa and asked Abu Jandal to mount a camera on the dashboard of his taxi, so that he could film himself chatting with passengers or thinking out loud as he drove.


Abu Jandal was a more elusive subject than the Iraqi doctor. He had passed through a government rehabilitation program and was counselling young Yemenis who might sympathize with Al Qaeda, but he hadn’t entirely rejected the ideology of jihad. Gregarious, intelligent, and shifty, he seemed to be playing every side. Once, when a passenger asked him about the camera in his taxi, he lied effortlessly, claiming that the battery had died—a moment that Poitras made sure to include in her film. “He was never who you thought he was,” she said. The story of Abu Jandal was “politically incorrect, and kind of dynamite.” She feared that her funders, who anticipated a film about innocent detainees, would run in the other direction. Michael Ratner, of the Center for Constitutional Rights, told her, “I’m trying to get people out of Guantánamo, and your film is not helpful.” She kept going, though, and finished the project, “The Oath,” in 2010.

You ask why I picked you. I didn’t. You did. The surveillance you’ve experienced means you’ve been selected, a term which will mean more to you as you learn about how the modern sigint system works.

From now, know that every border you cross, every purchase you make, every call you dial, every cell phone tower you pass, friend you keep, article you write, site you visit, subject line you type, and packet you route, is in the hands of a system whose reach is unlimited but whose safeguards are not. Your victimization by the NSA system means that you are well aware of the threat that unrestricted, secret abilities pose for democracies. This is a story that few but you can tell.