Eight days in Hong Kong: Laura Poitras on documenting Snowden for ‘Citizenfour’

At the time of Snowden’s first contact, Poitras was working on a documentary about surveillance that was to be the third in a trilogy of films about national security policies in post-9/11 America. While she worked on those documentaries from 2006 to 2012, she says she was interrogated and searched approximately 40 times at the U.S. border without any official explanation. At least once, she said, she also had electronics and materials seized. “When it first started happening, I was naive and thought as soon as they realize I am a journalist and filmmaker I’ll stop being detained at the border,” Poitras told me in an interview on Sunday. “And then it didn’t end. So after the first year of being detained every time I traveled, I became much more savvy. I [knew it]… would threaten my ability to do my work and so I started taking measures to protect myself and my sources.” Such was her level of concern that she moved to Berlin in the fall of 2012 as part of a promise she had made to her sources to edit the film outside of the U.S.

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Laura Poitras - PopTech 2010 - Camden, Maine