Laura Poitras
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Laura Poitras on Turning on the Camera
One extraordinary passage among many in Peter Maas’s New York Times Sunday Magazine cover article on Laura Poitras and her role in the Edward Snowden story details the symbolic meanings of the documentarian’s most basic act: turning on the camera. By this point in the story, Poitras has been contacted by Snowden, has had a series of encrypted exchanges with him, but doesn’t know who he is. She, along with journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill of The Guardian, travel to Hong Kong to meet the source for what will be the most explosive national security tale of modern times. […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 17, 2013 -
Filmmaker Laura Poitras Co-Authors Bombshell Domestic Spying Report
Like everyone, on Wednesday I read Glenn Greenwald’s Guardian report, “NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily.” I was outraged, but I can’t say I was shocked. I’ve known for some time —- since I was a teenager — that the NSA routinely scoops up all international communications. More to the point, I’d already written this info myself, on this site. In covering filmmaker Laura Poitras’s event at the Whitney Biennial last year, I described the presentation of her guest speaker, Bill Binney, the NSA whistleblower whose warnings have alarmed privacy advocates for years. I wrote: “Slides […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jun 7, 2013 -
Laura Poitras’s Spy Theater
There was a spooky feeling at the Whitney Biennial one Friday night this past April. Visitors to Laura Poitras’s “Surveillance Teach-In” were forcibly detained as they tried to enter the museum, while downstairs a masked man handed out leaflets with lists of addresses (NSA listening posts?), sinister in their nondescription. Slides flashed, of the anonymous desert buildings that house the servers that index our every email, phone call, transaction. And on the dais, an odd couple riffing one acronym after another: “NSA, NARIS, AES….” Hacker Jacob Appelbaum, black clad, with earrings, played something of a straight man, even as the […]
by Scott Macaulay on Aug 27, 2012 -
LAURA POITRAS AND OUR POLITICS OF BORDER CROSSINGS
I remember when I first typed documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras as one cool customer. I was interviewing her on the phone about her 2010 documentary, The Oath — for my money the best of the year. The film is about two Yemeni brothers-in-law, one a low-level driver for Osama bin Laden and the other a soldier who became an al-Qaida member and one of bin Laden’s personal bodyguards. But only one was sent to Guantanamo Bay — the driver, not the bodyguard who, at the film’s start, is seen driving a cab through Yemen and discussing jihad with the young […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 9, 2012 -
12 SUNDANCE FILMS I’M EXCITED TO SEE
Five years after finishing his wonderfully wacked-out debut, The Guataealan Handshake, Todd Rohal, frustrated by the time it was taking to set up a new movie, jumpstarted a micro-budget comedy about a priest. Called The Catechism Cataclysm, the movie was made for $50,000, and it got into Sundance, playing in last year’s midnight section. IFC bought the film for its Midnight label, releasing it to a scant $897 on a single screen. Rohal didn’t sweat it; the movie did what it needed to do for him (read Megan Holloway’s consideration here), and he went on to his next film. And […]
by Scott Macaulay on Jan 18, 2012 -
SPRING ISSUE ONLINE
Now online check out select stories from our Spring issue, which will hit stands next week. Alex Gibney talks about this latest doc, Casino Jack and the United States of Money; Laura Poitras follows up her Oscar nominated My Country, My Country with the powerful The Oath; and Bahman Ghobadi explains the challenges behind making No One Knows About Persian Cats. Plus, YouTube’s Sara Pollack discusses the site’s distribution model, production designer Jack Fisk recounts his 30-plus year career, Anthony Kaufman wonders where’s the under-30 indie film audience in Industry Beat, and in two passionate pieces that highlight opposite ends […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Apr 19, 2010 -
“THE OATH” | director, Laura Poitras
[PREMIERE SCREENING: Friday, Jan. 22, 9:30 pm — Temple Theatre, Park City] There is a scene in The Oath when I ask Abu Jandal if he would have participated in the 9/11 attacks if Osama bin Laden had asked him to participate. He answered my question (I don’t want to reveal his response), and the next day he asked me to delete it. I decided to include both his answer and his request to delete it in the film. In the process of editing the film, we held work-in-progress screenings and some people questioned the ethics of including his answer […]
by Jason Guerrasio on Jan 22, 2010
