Citizenfour has been awarded by the International Documentary Association with a top prize of the festival, as appears in the Best Feature category as winner. The winning of the Snowden-based documentary was previously anticipated by the supporters of Laura Poitras – director – but is now official, as the documentary left the awards as recipient.
The Citizenfour documentary is based on the experience of Edward Snowden, former CIA employee who leaked classified information to the press. Variety informs that Poitras was working on a ‘’documentary about governmental surveillance in the post-9/11 era’’ when she started receiving emails from Citizenfour. This nickname wrote to the journalist: “I am a senior government employee in the intelligence community. I hope you understand that contacting you was extremely high-risk.” It was not long until the story of Snowden as a fugitive genius unraveled. In the summer of 2013 he traveled to Hong Kong to share NSA top-secret documents to Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald. It was this context the one which gave the female documentarian the idea of creating Citizenfour and the newly received award proves that it was a great choice.
Other nominees in the category Best Feature were Finding Vivian Maier, Point and Shoot, The Salt of the Earth and Tales of the Grim Sleeper, but Laura Poitras topped them all with her Snowden-based documentary. The Wrap tackled on the difficulty of the director to previously come forward with the documentary at the same festival. She confessed that a year ago, her presence at the IDA awards would have been impossible, due to the secrecy with which the project was surrounded at the time: “Last year there was a lot of uncertainty and, I’ll admit, there was a lot of fear”. Relived and at ease with the current situation and the possibility to make public her work, Laura Poitras concluded: “To be on the other side of that fear is nice.”