Citizenfour
To complement Forensic Architecture and Laura Poitras' exhibition presented at the Musée d'art contemporain (Contagion de la terreur), and the 14th Max and Iris Stern International Symposium (March 12 and 13), we are offering this program of films devoted to the documentary work of Laura Poitras, Oscar winner in 2015. Her intensely current cinema is particularly concerned with new contemporary methods of global surveillance.
Best Documentary at the Oscars in 2015
CITIZENFOUR is a real life thriller, unfolding by the minute, giving audiences unprecedented access to filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwald’s encounters with Edward Snowden in Hong Kong, as he hands over classified documents providing evidence of mass indiscriminate and illegal invasions of privacy by the National Security Agency (NSA).

Laura Poitras
After a childhood in Massachusetts and studying gourmet cuisine, Laura Poitras abandoned her first vocation to settle in California and enroll at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she notably took classes with experimental filmmaker Ernie Gehr. She then left for New York and began to make politically engaged documentaries. My Country, My Country, which deals with the American occupation in Iraq, earned her in 2006 to be placed on the watch list of the United States Department of Homeland Security. She also works as a freelance journalist and in 2012 created a press freedom foundation with journalist Glenn Greenwald. It was with the latter that she subsequently collected the revelations of whistleblower Edward Snowden on the global surveillance of the National Security Agency. Poitras draws from it his most famous film, Citizenfour, which won the Oscar for best documentary in 2014.







