We've got the pleasure of being able to show a short trailer from an extraordinary new film that had its world debut last night at the New York Festival about Edward Snowden. It's called Citizenfour, it's directed by Laura Poitras, and it will have a theatrical opening elsewhere on October 24th. The New Yorker's wonderful writer George Packer has a piece about it in the upcoming issue and it's up online now.
The film is, I saw it last night, full of amazing realtime footage inside the hotel room in Hong Kong where Snowden, Poitras, and two other reporters were holed up for days before his escape to Moscow. One small piece of news is the revelation that isolated that Mr. Snowden's existence has been in Moscow, it just got a little less so starting in July, he was joined by his girlfriend then who's been living with him, and it may be the most watched Russian romance in exile now since, I was thinking since Julie Christie joined Dr.
Zhivago so. I'm a senior government employee in the intelligence community. I hope you understand that contacting you is extremely high risk. For now know that every border you cross, every purchase you make, every call you dial, every cell phone tower you pass, friend you keep, site you visit, and the subject on you type is in the hands of a system whose reach is unlimited, but whose safeguards are not.
In the end if you publish the source material I will likely be immediately implicated. I ask only that you ensure this information makes it home to the American public. Thank you and be careful, Citizen Four. Edward Joseph Snowden's the full name. So I think Citizenfour is amazing in capturing in real time what was going on in that Moscow hotel room and I think one thing it may put to bed are any concerns that some people have had, critics have had that Edward Snowden might be a spy with some kind of nefarious master plan because you see this scramble in this hotel room that made me wanna ask my first question which was it seemed like the planning for distributing this information to the reporters was very careful that you did, you had three backup, three reporters so there would be backups and you took precautions on how to cover the security for that, but it was almost as if there was no end plan beyond that for yourself.
And so it seemed when you first arrived you were talking about you know you were the one who was gonna be nailed to the cross and that was, you were ready to deal with it, but eventually as the days went on it seemed like there was possibility that arrived for escape and maybe a way out of that box you were in in that room.
