It’s not very often I get turned around on an issue from
a documentary film. I didn’t think much about Edward Snowden when his name was
big in the news for revealing that the NSA was collecting data on everyone’s
phone calls and emails. It struck me as suspicious that, of all places, he
wound up in Russia, after first spending significant time in China. Was some
foreign government supporting him? And why? I thought, at the very least, he had
committed a crime by leaking classified documents. Laura Poitras’s documentary Citizenfour allows us to spend lots of
time with him, giving us the sense of really getting to know the man and make a
decision for ourselves about him.
