Edward Snowden film Citizenfour leads pack in Oscar documentary category

[kpete]

Edward Snowden film Citizenfour leads pack in Oscar documentary category
The film, directed by Laura Poitras, explores the life of the whistleblower whose revelations about the NSA sent shockwaves around the world


Laura Poitras’s film Citizenfour, looking at the exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden, has been nominated for the best documentary Oscar.

Poitras spent eight days with Snowden in Hong Kong as his revelations about the NSA were published in the Guardian, and instantly created a major diplomatic event. Along with input from Glenn Greenwald, the film also looks at the aftermath of the revelations, with Snowden moving to Russia while the US, having shown to be spying on its citizens on a vast scale, scrambled a response.

.................

With its incredible access and agenda-setting subject, Citizenfour could well consider itself the favourite in the category. It faces competition from Wim Wenders’ The Salt of the Earth, a biographical doc looking at photographer Sebastian Salgado; the similarly-minded Finding Vivian Maier, whose stunning street photography was discovered long after her death; Last Days in Vietnam, looking at the chaos of Saigon as the Americans departed following the war; and Virunga, a Netflix-produced doc exploring a national park in Congo under threat from militia.

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/15/edward-snowden-film-citizenfour-oscar-documentary-category