At tonight's Academy Awards ceremony, Laura Poitras' Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour won the award for Best Documentary Feature. Despite being the odds-on favorite for the award, the field was competitive this year, including Netflix's critically acclaimed Virunga for the honor.

Citizenfour, which saw wide release last fall, offers an inside look at the first week of the Snowden leaks. Filmmaker Poitras was first contacted by Snowden about the NSA's surveillance activities in January 2013. By May, she had flown out to Hong Kong to conduct her first on-camera interviews with the whistleblower. Her second set of interviews were done with Glenn Greenwald in Russia later that year. Though plenty was left on the cutting room floor, the movie earned a number of awards on its way to the Oscars, including a BAFTA for Best Documentary.