The Woman Who Hacked Hollywood

Laura Poitras’ name was once on terror watch lists. Now it’s on an Oscar. Here’s her personal journey.

It’s been almost ten years since Laura Poitras’ name has been on the NSA Watch List. Every time she returns to her home country, security agents wait for her, somewhere between the gate of the plane and the US Immigration booth. They take her away to a room, confiscate her gear, her notebooks, and her videos. They question her and copy her hard drives. This has happened to her at least forty times since 2006.

Her crime? To document history, the signs of our troubled times. To make her point, she never lectures but uses cinema-vérité: I want to understand big issues through personal stories that you could reflect on. My work is about filming people in horrible situations trying to do the right thing.

It’s not just her work. It’s her life.

Laura is born in Boston to Jim Poitras, an MIT graduate and engineer; and Pat, a nurse. She initially trains as a chef and becomes an apprentice at L’Espalier in Boston, and at Masa, the French cuisine mecca in San Francisco. For ten years, she works fourteen-hour days and learns the demands and rigors of the job. She exhausts herself checking ingredients and temperatures, burrowing into the chemical mysteries of cooking. This is when I learned to deal with uncertainty. But those mysteries cannot satisfy an urge to speak truth. Gastronomy can be many things, but you cannot talk about tragedy. There is nothing that stays. I realized I wanted to talk about important things.

She takes part-time film classes at the prestigious San Francisco Art Institute, before continuing her studies in New York. One day she is in the city editing Flag Wars, her project about the gentrification of an African-American district by a trendy, white, gay community, when she receives an email alerting her that a plane just hit the World Trade Center. She leaves her Upper West Side building, walks downtown as the Towers fall, one after the other.

In the days that follow, she installs her camera close to Ground Zero, but decides to flip it. Instead of filming the ruins, she captures inhabitants as they discover them, using long stills and extreme slow motion shots in the style of the artist Bill Viola. The result is the experimental O’say can you see, an elegy to lost opportunity after a catastrophe, which now plays in a couple of museums. In New York, the street was filled with compassion. We could have used that energy for rule of law. We chose violence instead.

‘You have to be ready to venture out’

Laura can’t look away as Bush Administration prepares the American people for war. She absorbs the terms: Weapons of Mass Destruction, Patriot Act, Axis of Evil. That was schizophrenic and crazy. Starting from there, information became very abstract and removed. September 11 created a power vacuum that itself created unintended consequences. Media collapsed after 9/11 and became propaganda. That was scary. I wanted to say something about it, to articulate the dangers that I saw and translate it into human terms.

Laura wants to head for Iraq, the new theater of operations, far removed from the public eye. Defying her journalist friends’ warnings, she contacts General Herbert L. Altshuler, then Major General in charge of the United States Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (USACAPOC), and asks to be embedded. She argues she is aiming to create a primary document on the historical nation building process and the first democratic elections. We met the same day the Abu Ghraib pictures leaked. I guess for the Army, nothing could have been worse than that. General Altshuler lets Laura in.

In Baghdad, with no preset plan, she films constantly what she witnesses, UN and US Army briefings, life in the Green Zone, the street view from inside a tank. I like the uncertainty. When I start a project, I do not know where it will go or where I will be. You have to venture out. If you are patient, things will happen. Like coincidences. All my best scenes come after coincidences.

Laura wants to report on the conditions of prisoners in detention, who were herded into camps under the desert sun. She is shooting the surroundings of the Abu Ghraib jail when a group of Iraqi human rights activists get out of a bus. Among them, a doctor works to evaluate the basic medical needs of the sick through a wire fence. A child calls out, trying to catch his attention. He is nine years old. Laura captures the scene and find her lead character in her documentary: Doctor Riyadh al-Adhadh is a Sunni candidate for elections. For six months, she shadows him everywhere, from medical consultations to political meetings, in his kitchen, with his family.

I find the plot of my films by following people. And she has talents for it. Laura is a tall, white American woman in a Muslim country at war with hers. She fades into the background and earns the trust of the people she meets, all while her camera is still rolling. She never judges. It is her hallmark as a filmmaker. I ground myself in personal stories. I try to disappear and then understand what those people teach us about the situation.

She records Doctor Riyadh’s journey, his own battle to heal people, to protect his country, his values, his loved ones. His journey is the story of a population that does not know what to do with this nation-building process, imported from America, like the bombs that rip cities and citizens. Barely seen nor known, Laura imbues emotions and flesh to the disembodied and antiseptic reality presented by news organizations. She tells the fear and the compromise. I was following this other character, a private contractor in charge of securing the Iraqi elections who needed weapons, a lot of them. We headed to Kurdistan and I was waiting in my hotel room when he asked if he could borrow it for a business meeting. I agreed but asked to film the scene. They accepted as long as my camera stayed on him, not on his business partner, a Peshmerga officer. And that’s how I filmed a black market gun deal.

Dollars and weapons change hands. Money flourishes on hatred. Or is that the other way around ? “Oil is a curse. Violence will increase, not decrease,”says Doctor Riyadh, as the camera rolls. Laura witnesses it all and never renders judgement. Through personal stories, she weaves an inconvenient history: in the name of war on terror, a war on freedom. In a way, I am still working on this topic.

My Country, My Country, Laura’s second film, is nominated for an Oscar. Shown in military schools, it wins praise from odd quarters: the US Army. They thought I was fair.

She moves forward with her exploration of Post 9/11 America and goes to Yemen, on the trail of two brothers-in-law who both worked for Osama bin Laden. Abu Jandal, his ex bodyguard, now drives a taxi in Sanaa. Salim Hamdan, his former personal driver, is being held in Guantanamo. She depicts their two parallel lives made of jihad, military commissions, and dogma.

The Oath, is released in 2010 and wins the Excellence in Cinematography Award (Documentary) at the Sundance Film Festival, shows the radicalization at work on both sides of the conflict. All through, her heart aches. I lost all my naïve ideals in Yemen and Guantanamo: I knew there we were not addressing the real issue. We were not learning. Like My Country, My Country, Laura’s film offers her view of the world to come: the West barricaded in, ISIS barbarians at the gate, the moral void, the assault on civil liberties and justice. ”With Abu Grahib and Guantanamo we could not have done more to unravel our violence. Before September 11th, there were some fanatics and terrorists, for sure. But far fewer than today”.

From Rio to Berlin via Assange

And as an artist, a journalist or as a citizen, she is no threat to her government. The Constitution protects her speech and her ability to move around. But after the Patriot Act, neither the First Amendment or the Fourth seems to exist in airports. Along with Guantanamo, they prove that War on terror has made its way onto American soil.

The painful experiences she has been suffering there since the release of My country My country could have intimidated and stopped her. They do not. They nurture her interest, spur her reflections on the harassment she experiences because of her films. Laura learns to deal with pressure, to protect her work. She begins a documentary on the state of surveillance. She looks for non-fiction characters whose story will cast light on the frightening spectre of surveillance.

She has been following Glenn Greenwald’s work for years. A civil rights lawyer turned blogger, turned freelancer and independent columnist, he has been vociferous in his defense of Chelsea Manning (then Bradley) who passed millions of classified information to Wikileaks. The former intelligence analyst is kept in solitary confinement, in his underwear, in a 6’ x 8’ cell lit with neon lighting, 23 hours a day. He is deprived of natural light and time referents, pushed to madness.

In April 2011, Laura films Greenwald in Rio, where he lives. She also meets Jacob Appelbaum, a security expert and a hacker’s hero since he co-founded TOR, a system allowing people to communicate anonymously. Appelbaum is also a Manning defender. Like Laura, he is systematically detained and interrogated upon arrival in his native United States.

In 2012, she interviews the whistleblowers known as the “NSA Four” (Thomas Drake, Kirk Wiebe, Edward Loomis and William Binney). In August 2012, on the New York Times website, she publishes her film The Program focusing on Binney’s testimony on NSA. In 2001, Binney, one of NSA’s best mathematicians and code breakers, resigned from the Agency after 32 years of loyal services, to denounce the Stellar Wind program. Approved shortly after 9/11, Stellar Wind enables NSA to collect and link private information (emails, internet activity, localizations) of any American citizen.

Laura flies to London to meet Julian Assange. On her return, she is detained for four hours at the Newark airport. She is ushered into an interrogation room. She takes out her pen to document the incident. The agents tell her to put it away. Her pen, they say, is a dangerous weapon.

To finish her work, she chooses exile. On Appelbaum’s advice, she moves to Berlin. Life under the former East German spy agency, Stasi, has influenced legislators and citizens alike. Privacy laws, reasonable rents, and the vibrant Chaos Computer Club all make it a perfect hub for artists, hackers and free culture activists. She drafts a list of people she needs to complete her project, including a film editor.

At the top of her list is Mathilde Bonnefoy, whose film Run Lola Run she admires. Mathilde has been living in Berlin for twenty years but meets with Laura in Paris, where she is trying to make a comeback on the French cinema scene. “At the time, I didn’t want to do any more editing. My plan was to go into directing,” explains Mathilde. “But I changed my mind when I met her. You can tell she is someone you can trust.” Mathilde and her husband, German independent film producer Dirk Wilutzky, offer Laura their place in Berlin while they stay in Paris. In March 2013, their neighbors move out. Laura takes the flat. When Wilutzky and Mathilde come back, the two women start the editing of Laura’s “impressive material” according to Mathilde, in Dirk’s home office.