A Survival Guide for Living Under Total Surveillance.
Filmmaker, Pulitzer Prize winner, Academy Award winner and TheIntercept founder Laura Poitras’ Astro Noise exhibit started yesterday on February 5th and will run until May 1st at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The accompanying book will be published on February 23rd (Pre-order NOW!)
Laura Poitras: Astro Noise includes a series of public events featuring artists, journalists, and scholars.
“an engrossing solo show.”
Holland Cotter has been a staff art critic at The New York Times. Read more.
Poitras has explored the themes of mass surveillance, “war on terror,” drone program, Guantánamo, with films like My Country, My Country and The Oath, and torture in her work for more than ten years. In 2013, Poitras was contacted by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency subcontractor who leaked classified information about government-sponsored surveillance. Her resulting documentary, Citizenfour, which won an Academy Award for best documentary feature in 2015, is the third film in her post-9/11 film trilogy. (Source Amazon)
“I share this with Glenn Greenwald and the other journalists who are exposing truth. Thank you.”
“Those eight minutes changed my life, though I didn’t know it at the time,” she says in an audio narration that plays around the documents in her exhibition.
Poitras has been on the US government’s radar after she filmed an Iraqi family in Baghdad for the documentary My Country, My Country. “After returning to the United States I was placed on a government watch list and detained and searched every time I crossed the US border. It took me ten years to find out why.”
“U.S. media representative … involved with anti-coalition forces.”
Poitras got her hands on 800 documents she’s received in her FOIA lawsuit, which is still ongoing, and was the main motivation for her book. The heavily redacted documents show that the US Army Criminal Investigation Command requested in 2006, see Poitras as a possible threat to national security…
Read more in Andy Greenbergs’ brilliant feb 4th WIRED article:
If you are at the Rotterdam Film festival (IFFR 2016) this weekend. Go to visual journalism unit FIELD OF VISION, Initiated by Laura Poitras herself. The films of the Field of Vision unit cover various, complex stories across the world with a unique and sharp look. This is truly visual journalism at its best!
More on Field of Vision – The Intercept.
Photo credit: PraxisFilms.