Back in January of 2013, Laura Poitras a documentary filmmaker who received the MacArthur Genius Fellowship award in 2012 and shared a 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service was a few years into creating a documentary about the increase in surveillance America saw post 9/11 when she suddenly received several encrypted e-mails from a mysterious source, calling themselves “citizen four”. Citizenfour was prepared to blow the whistle on the surveillance programs set up by the NSA and other such intelligence agencies.

Citizenfour was of course Edward Snowden, and in June of 2013 once this became apparent Poitras and reporter Glen Greenwald flew to Hong Kong to have their first of many filmed interviews which later helped to create this movie.