Director
Laura Poitras
Leading Actors/Actresses
Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald
Supporting Actors/Actresses
William Binney, Ewen MacAskill
Genre
Documentary, Biography
Language
English
Awards
Won Academy Award for Best Documentary, Feature
Date of Release
2014
Producer
Mathilde Bonnefoy, Laura Poitras, Dirk Wilutzky
Setting and Context
Hong Kong, Germany January 2013-August 2013
Narrator and Point of View
Point of view is that of Edward Snowden. Narrator is Laura Poitras
Tone and Mood
Serious, Dramatic
Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonist is Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald. Antagonist is the NSA.
Major Conflict
Snowden desires to release classified documents from the NSA through Greenwald in order to ensure the intelligence agency stops spying on private citizens.
Climax
Snowden receives temporary asylum from Russia for a period of one year so that he isn't extradited to the United States. And, we learn that the President of the United States is involved in the spying scandals.
Foreshadowing
The opening shot of a car driving down a dark tunnel with very little light foreshadows that these people are going down a dark path with no end in sight.
Understatement
It is understated that Snowden will escape from the grasp of the NSA.
Innovations in Filming or Lighting or Camera Techniques
N/A
Allusions
The film is an allusion to the misuse of power by U.S. government intelligence agencies with the support of the White House, and how those in power have created the necessity for a world with no privacy in order to protect people, while at the same time they are invasively and deliberately breaking the laws that they demand others to pay for breaking.
Paradox
The U.S. government wants to prosecute Snowden to the full extent of the law. Paradoxically, no one is being held accountable in the intelligence community for breaking privacy laws for decades.
Parallelism
The beginning of the film shows us encrypted emails from Snowden deciphered. This is paralleled at the end of the film in a different way as Greenwald uses scraps of paper as a way to "encrypt" his conversation with Snowden so as not to be heard by any spies who've potentially bugged the room.
