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Citizenfour, which snagged the Oscar for Best Documentary on Sunday night, is now available to stream with your HBO Go subscription.
If you’re unfamiliar with how this controversial documentary came to be, it goes a little something like this:
After receiving encrypted emails regarding information on the U.S. government’s covert-surveillance system (basically, super secret spy gear, programs, and training), documentarian Laura Poitras (My Country, My Country) flew to Hong Kong with reporter Glenn Greenwald to meet with the mysterious “Citizen Four,” who turned out to be Edward Snowden.
Snowden, famous for leaking the NSA’s illegal spying practices on American citizens, reached out to Poitras to have his side of the sensationalized whistleblowing scandal told. The director, who has dealt with her own fair share of government ridicule for her multiple post-9/11 documentaries, agreed to film their conversations about what really happened leading up to June 2013, when Snowden abandoned his post as an NSA system administrator and went public with highly classified intel. Post-leaks, Snowden was all but forced out of the country (now on asylum in Russia) and deemed a traitor by both the American government as well as the media, the very outlets he went to in the first place. Snowden’s story is one that questions what defines a traitor versus what it means to be a patriot, and what exactly freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and the right to privacy entails in our hyper-surveilled world. Poitras, whose filmmaking style borderlines on essayist but never crosses the pointed Michael Moore line so-to-speak, gathers all information possible and leaves for you to decide.
If you need a refresher on the government leaks, watch the trailer below before you delve in.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiGwAvd5mvM]Like what you see? Follow Decider on Facebook and Twitter to join the conversation, and sign up for our email newsletters to be the first to know about streaming movies and TV news!
