Movie Review: Risk

Risk *** / *****

Directed by: Laura Poitras.   

Written by: Laura Poitras.

 

During the time Laura Poitras was filming Risk, her new documentary about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, she also shot, edited and released her Edward Snowden documentary Citizenfour – which of course, won her an Oscar. That film was a tightly contained, almost thriller, in which Snowden spends a few days in a Hong Kong hotel room with Poitras and a few journalists, explaining all the data he has leaked to them, just before their stories hit the airwaves. It also helped that while there are many contradictory feelings about Snowden out there (and in my case, my own head) – he really does seem to be a fairly earnest, straight forward kind of guy. What you see is what you get, and he’s not really trying to play Poitras, or anyone else. Risk, and Assange, is a different animal as it was shot over the course of seven years, and in fact more footage has been shot and added since the film debuted at Cannes in 2016. Poitras’ feelings towards Assange – and other figures in the film – changes as well. This makes for a very messy film – but a fascinating one.

 

This isn’t a film to watch if you don’t know anything about Wikileaks or Assange. That would be Alex Gibney’s We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks, which does a good job running down their history. This is a more intimate film, in which Poitras simply points her camera at Assange as he goes about his days, and films. She wonders why he’s giving her so much access – he doesn’t seem to like her very much she says – and yet, there she is when he and a colleague try and get then Secretary of State Hilary Clinton on the phone to warn her that all of the State Department’s communication were about to be leaked – not by them, but because they themselves have been compromised (I cannot decide if egomania, brazenness or sheer idiocy that the pair call up the State Department and ask to speak to Hilary Clinton). At first, it feels like Poitras admires Assange and WikiLeaks, as well as Jacob Appelbaum, who also works there, and who we see loudly demanding accountability from Egypt’s telecommunication companies after the Arab Spring. If Assange always seemed like an egomaniac, perhaps doing good work, Appelbaum seemed like a good guy through and through. By the end, of course, her outlook on both changes drastically.

 

It’s fairly early in the film when Assange gets charged with rape with Sweden – and faces an extradition warrant back to Sweden, which he appeals as high as he could go in England, and when he still loses, starts to hide in the Ecuadorian embassy where he remains today – claiming it’s all just a ruse to get him back to Sweden, where they will end up sending him to America on more serious charges (I’ve never quite understood if that was the case, why America wanted him sent back to Sweden first – why not just get the Brits to send him back – but no, matter). Assange, of course, says the whole thing is a conspiracy against him, and he’s completely innocent. He may well be (since he won’t go back and face charges, we’ll never know) – but in the film he does go on a pretty toxic rant about radical feminists, and lesbian nightclubs, that wouldn’t be out of place on a MRA Forum. That scene is fascinating to watch the women around him, and how they react (or try not to).

 

Risk ends up becoming a study in contradictions – something Poitras admits in the film, as she didn’t know that was the movie she was making. It is about Assange who wants to expose everyone’s secrets but his own – about Appelbaum, who Poitras admits having a brief affair with – also being accused of abuse and sexual assault, while trying to project a more wholesome image of Assange (he does okay at first – but there are a few more cringe-y moments later in the film). While Assange lets Poitras back after the Snowden affair, he never forgave her for not letting Wikileaks have any of the information – instead allowing it to go the mainstream media. As Hilary Clinton’s emails get leaked, by Wikileaks, Poitras wants to know if he got them from Russia – and he won’t say, although he clearly hates Hilary Clinton.

 

You can make you want of Edward Snowden and what he did – I’m still conflicted myself – but it wasn’t really about him, and he knew it. For Assange, everything is about him – he masks it behind his ideology, that again, you can agree with or not, but he’s always at the center of it.

 

All of this makes Risk sound probably more interesting to watch than it actually is. The film is one of those that’s more interesting in retrospect – more interesting to talk about than to actually watch. The film meanders, and doesn’t always have a clear thought process behind what we’re seeing and why (I’m not sure why Poitras felt it necessary to show the embarrassing footage of Lady Gaga, but she does). This isn’t as good as Citizenfour (and neither is as good as her underseen doc from before them, The Oath) – but it is a fascinating one.

Movie Review: Citizenfour

Citizenfour
Directed by: Laura Poitras.

No matter what you think of Edward Snowden – I would encourage you to see Citizenfour, and do so with an open mind. This is a documentary, made my filmmaker Laura Poitras, as a paranoid thriller – in which we witness it subject as he is making history – meeting with the director and journalist Glen Greenwald from The Guardian over the course of a week in a hotel room in Hong Kong. During the course of this one week, Snowden will give Greenwald, and his colleague, all the top secret information that he stole from his job working for the NSA – information that essentially proves that the government is collecting data from pretty much everyone. Snowden worked for Booze Allen, but was loaned out to the NSA for years, and finally decided to take a moral stand for what he believes in, and got all the information to reporters that he trusted – reporters who would have access to everything Snowden took, but would be free to publish whatever they want. Poitras was contacted through secret, encrypted e-mails from Snowden – who picked her because of her previous work (two feature documentaries about the Post 9/11 World, and her work with another former NSA employee – William Binney, who explains the ins and outs of what exactly happened. Citizenfour doesn’t pretend to me a fair and balanced documentary – it is pro-Snowden all the way, and doesn’t hide that fact – Poitras even seems to be protective of Snowden.

We know the information that Snowden leaked out a year ago now – it basically showed that the NSA had the capability to collect not just “metadata” – that is information like who is talking to who – but the ability to intercept content as well – that is precisely what is written to others in e-mails, or said over the phone. We also know well what happened to Snowden after the stories came out – he didn’t try to hide his identity, which he knew would be futile, but instead gave an interview to Poitras, who gave it to the news networks, where he came forward as the leak. He then fled Hong Kong, and ended up in no man’s land in an airport in Russia, after American revoked his passport. He has now been granted residency there and lives there in an undisclosed location.

Citizenfour is fascinating as it shows this history as it happens. Much of the movie is just Poitras and her camera, Snowden and Greenwald in the hotel room, as Snowden explains the information he is revealing, his motivation for revealing it, and his desire to not try to hide. It is tempting to see Snowden as an idealist – and to some he is a hero for revealing what he did. That is also clearly how Poitras sees him – she never really pushes Snowden on any of his answers, but simply shows Snowden how he wants to be seen. I found myself questioning his motivations a little bit more than Poitras did – there is certainly a degree of self-aggrandizement to him that goes unquestioned. I’m also not ready to just call Snowden a hero, like some have. Yes, the information he revealed was disturbing in the extreme – and has led to a necessary debate about what the government should be allowed to do and monitor, especially without a court order. But do we really want individual employees of the NSA, or CIA or FBI, etc., deciding what information should be revealed to the public, and what information should be considered top secret? There needs to be a balance between what the government can monitor and civil liberties to be sure – but if everyone did what Snowden did, then the entire intelligence gathering industry by the government would fall apart. Is that what we want?

Citizenfour doesn’t really address those questions – at least not very deeply. But they are definitely in the movie just the same – and will likely inspire heated debate between viewers after the film. But there is still value in showing Snowden in the way he wants to be seen – and Greenwald how he wants to be seen as well.

Besides, that is just one element of Citizenfour, which Poitras edits like a political thriller – more than one person evokes the name John LeCarre in the film – and at times, this certainly does feel like a real life spy movie. Poitras uses her editing, her shots of various chats between the various players involved, and the great music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross to paint a truly disturbing, terrifying, real world paranoid thriller. It almost plays alike a dystopian fantasy at times – while Snowden certainly references Obama, and Bush, as well as others as the “villains” in the movie – the reality is that villain is really some sort of huge, multinational conglomerate of government agencies and giant corporations – a nameless, faceless entity of enormous size. Some of Snowden’s precautions seem to be taking paranoia to an extreme degree – the way he unplugs his hotel phone, because he’s worried it is being used a live mic (by who, he never says), the way he jumps at a fire alarm testing, or how he covers himself with a towel while entering in some information on a computer – although the only people in the room are the ones he is revealing the information to in the first place. But hell, Snowden had good reason to be paranoid – and according to Poitras, so do the rest of us.

 
Citizenfour is a fascinating, disturbing documentary. I certainly don’t agree with all of the arguments the film makes – but then again, I don’t need to agree with a documentary to think it’s worthwhile to see. Citizenfour is a must-see documentary for everyone. No matter what you think of Snowden – whether you think he’s a hero or a villain – you may well find your view of him challenged throughout the film – and that alone makes this one of the year’s best documentaries.  

DVD Review: The Oath

The Oath *** ½
Directed By: Laura Poitras.
Featuring: Abu Jandal, Salim Hamdam.

The Oath is a fascinating documentary about a man full of contradictions. Abu Jandal was Osama Bin Laden’s personal bodyguard from 1996 to 2000 – when he was arrested and put in jail in his native Yemen. Soon after 9/11, the FBI comes calling on Jandal, who tells them pretty much everything they want to know. His case has even been used as a model on how to extract information from terrorists with torture or “enhanced interrogation techniques” or whatever you want to call them. He was released in 2003 after going through the “discussion” program, where he has to take an oath that he will not be involved in terrorism again. Oaths are big in Islam, and breaking one damns one to hell. But Jandal already broke one Oath when he left Bin Laden in the first place.

The other person in the film is heard but not seen. This is Salim Hamdam, Jandal’s brother in law who he helped recruit. He was arrested and sold to the Americans, who put him in Guantanamo Bay, where he was subject to “enhanced interrogation techniques”, but didn’t give anywhere near the information Jandal did. That’s because according to just about everyone, Hamdam was little more than a paid driver for Bin Laden. He had no knowledge of operations being planned or anything else. He was paid to drive, and he did. His case went all the way to the Supreme Court – where shockingly he won – when the court ruled that what they were doing violated the Geneva Convention. Congress acted quickly and passed a law so that the Government can charge Hamdam with additional crimes – and they do – and soon his is the first case being tried by military tribunal. The result of the case hangs over the film.

Jandal seems to want to have it all. He talks to young men who are interested in becoming jihadists themselves – but his message contradicts itself from session to session – sometimes he seems to be actively recruiting the men (which would be a violation of his second oath) and other times, he seems to be cautioning them. We see him talk to numerous media outlets in the film – both Western and Arab – and he changes what he says in each interview – playing to the audience if you will. He plays to the camera of director Laura Poitras as well – and the one time he seemingly get angry is when he wants her to delete something she recorded the previous day. What did he say? That he didn’t believe that the 9/11 attack was justified as it killed civilians – he would rather meet America on the battlefield. Why is he so ashamed of that remark? Perhaps because it may threaten the media stardom he holds in Yemen.

Jandal is such a fascinating person because you can never quite nail him down on anything. The portrait that finally emerges however would be ironic when compared to Hamdam if it weren’t so tragic. Jandal it seems had a lot of knowledge of what was being tried. He met, and welcomed, each 9/11 hijacker. His job was to great new recruits when they arrived at the camps, and figure out ways to “break them down” to make them more committed. Here is a true terrorist, who we see sit with his family, drive his taxi, talk to new young men who want to martyr themselves for the cause, and everything else. Meanwhile Hamdam, the driver, sits in Guantanamo Bay.

Does Jandal belong in jail? I honestly don’t know. Since being released, he hasn’t really done anything except talk. But when talking to young men who are considering joining Al Qaeda, and by extension killing people, isn’t talking more dangerous than anything else? When asked why he didn’t take part in 9/11 or any other suicide attack, he reasons he could have done so at any time. But he felt his skills were better suited elsewhere. The Oath is a fascinating documentary – that while illuminating the flaws in Bush era policies towards terrorists and the War on Terror itself – also reminds you that there are people out there who want to destroy America. If only we could tell the difference between those who do, and those who simply drive them.