Poitras says that there is nothing she’d “rather do than be behind the camera with people, in real time, confronting life decisions.” Photograph by James Day

From the garden terrace of a sixth-floor walkup on a quiet Berlin street, there was a clear view to the TV Tower, in Alexanderplatz. The tower, completed by the East Germans in 1969, once served as the biggest symbol of a regime that maintained its power by spying relentlessly on its citizens. It’s now a piece of harmless Cold War kitsch—a soaring concrete column with a shiny top resembling a disco ball. On the front door of the apartment somebody had affixed a sticker that mimicked the visual style of the “Hope” campaign poster for Barack Obama, with the words “Ein Bett für Snowden” (“A Bed for Snowden”) next to the face of the world’s most famous fugitive. The sticker was part of a movement advocating that Edward Snowden, who is living in exile in Russia, be given political asylum in Germany. The apartment’s interior had been turned into a film studio, where Laura Poitras—the maker of documentaries who, last year, helped Snowden leak documents exposing the fact that the National Security Agency collects huge amounts of data on United States citizens—was in the final days of a three-year project about surveillance in America.

Poitras was the first person to learn of Snowden’s trove of files, in early 2013, and for months it remained their secret. From the beginning, the language of their correspondence was heightened. Snowden wrote to Poitras, “You asked why I chose you. I didn’t. You chose yourself.” He was referring to films of hers that were critical of the war on terror—in particular, a short piece on an N.S.A. whistle-blower named William Binney. That June, they met in a hotel in Hong Kong, and Poitras made and released a twelve-minute video in which Snowden introduced himself to the world. Since then, he has given numerous interviews, and the journalist Glenn Greenwald, Poitras’s reporting partner on the story, has published a book. But Poitras, guarding her privacy, has said very little while she has finished work on her film. Anticipation kept building, and it was global news when the Film Society of Lincoln Center announced that it would present the première, on October 10th. (A wider release follows, on October 24th.)

Poitras is fifty years old, with brown eyes that habitually have a look of alarm, as if she were staring at something from which she wanted to escape. Her features—strong nose; sensitive mouth; a long wave of dark hair, parted in the middle—bring to mind a Victorian artist, a woman of character whose intensity is kept under wraps. Inside the studio, the atmosphere was discreet and tense: thoughts were conveyed in shorthand, words were swallowed, sentences trailed off. This is Poitras’s style, and her small team of collaborators followed her lead. The group was international, and included an American co-producer, Katy Scoggin; a German producer, Dirk Wilutzky; and his French-American wife, Mathilde Bonnefoy, who served as Poitras’s editor. They worked on computers with high levels of encryption, memorized extremely long passwords that were frequently changed, left their phones outside, and shut the windows in rooms where sensitive conversations took place. They were compressing ten weeks of work into less than a month, in time for the première.

Scoggin came to Berlin from New York last year to work with Poitras for a month. A year and a half later, she was still here. “She’s been kind to me, but there’s something deeper in her,” Scoggin said. “It’s this urgency to tell stories, to be a voice that is crying out, saying, ‘Wait, look at what is happening.’ It’s not yelling, it’s not strident, but it’s done with great conviction and force.”

Poitras and Bonnefoy (whose credits include the crime thriller “Run Lola Run”) sat before a monitor, looking at the film’s final scene. No one had seen it besides them and Wilutzky. Bonnefoy, using a keyboard, kept replaying the scene, a few seconds at a time.

Poitras asked me to look away from the monitor. Some footage apparently risked exposing an anonymous source. “There’s one identifying thing,” she told Bonnefoy. “Scroll down, scroll down. I think you just take this out altogether. The whole thing. It’s too identifying. I think, given the risk, we should be careful. What I have the clearance to do is focus on the drone strikes and the watch list.” The watch list is the U.S. government’s long roster of known terrorists and other people deemed to pose a serious national-security risk.

Poitras and Bonnefoy spent a few minutes redacting frames while I looked at the wall behind them. There were dozens of stills from the film, and white cards on which Bonnefoy had written notes. One card said:

too many substories in act 3 show more of ES thinking (breathing pauses) more atmospheric moments in HK/more outside shots show demonstrations after Merkel?

“Now you can look,” Bonnefoy told me.

In the footage, Snowden and Greenwald, both of them wearing blue button-downs, are sitting in a Moscow hotel room. Greenwald scribbles notes on sheets of stationery—in order to elude possible audio surveillance—and passes them to Snowden. Greenwald has news for Snowden: an intelligence source has disclosed detailed information about U.S. drone strikes. Greenwald conveys this in a combination of broken sentences, jotted phrases, and obscure jargon.

Bonnefoy said, “The problem is, there’s something in the way Glenn explains this—which is, of course, very cryptic—that makes it completely hard to understand.”

Poitras explained to Bonnefoy aspects of the program that Greenwald was describing. How could this be conveyed onscreen? Bonnefoy wanted more of the dialogue between Snowden and Greenwald to be included. But Poitras, determined to protect the new source, was cutting the scene down to just a few phrases and gestures.

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She and Bonnefoy turned to the documentary’s opening shot: a tunnel in Hong Kong, filmed with a narrow aperture, so that the camera appeared to be speeding through black space. A pattern of lights flashed overhead like Morse-code dashes. It created an ominous mood, evoking the beginning of David Lynch’s “Lost Highway.” The sound of wind rose and, in voice-over, an unidentified female—Poitras—read one of the first e-mails she received from Snowden: “At this stage I can offer nothing more than my word. I am a senior government employee in the intelligence community.”

Bonnefoy stopped the film. They were still polishing the soundtrack. Poitras said, “I’d love to try something electronic in it, and sort of move away from the wind.”

The voice-over continued, accompanied by a low vibrating sound, like an electronic sine wave, with eerie piano notes: “It will be your decision as to whether or how to declare my involvement. My personal desire is that you paint the target directly on my back. No one, not even my most trusted confidante, is aware of my intentions, and it would not be fair for them to fall under suspicion for my actions. You may be the only one who can prevent that, and that is by immediately nailing me to the cross rather than trying to protect me as a source.” The wind sound rose and faded. “On timing, regarding meeting up in Hong Kong, the first rendezvous attempt will be at 10 a.m. local time on Monday. We will meet in the hallway outside of the restaurant in the Mira Hotel. I will be working on a Rubik’s Cube so you can identify me.”