For Immediate Release: October 13, 2014 Press Contacts: Natalie Raabe, (212) 286-6591 Molly Erman, (212) 286-7936 Ariel Levin, (212) 286-5996

Laura Poitras’s Closeup View of Edward Snowden

In the October 20, 2014, issue of The New Yorker, in “The Holder of Secrets” (p. 50), George Packer joins the Oscar-nominated film- maker Laura Poitras in her Berlin studio as she and her team make the final edits to the new film “Citizenfour”—a documentary about Edward Snowden and surveillance in America—a project that she has never spoken about at any length, which appears in wide release this month. Packer speaks extensively to Poitras, and reports on new details about Edward Snowden that the film reveals. Poitras—who, last year, helped Snowden leak documents exposing the fact that the National Security Agency collects huge amounts of data on United States citizens—was the first person to learn of Snowden’s trove of files, in early 2013. At the time that Snowden made contact, Poitras was in the midst of making a nonlinear documentary about domestic surveillance and the people who stood up to it. Poitras told Snowden that she wanted to meet him and film him. “He said, ‘It’s too dangerous, and it’s not about me—I don’t want to be the story,’ ” she tells Packer. “I said, ‘Like it or not, you’re going to be the story, so you might as well get your voice in.’ After that point, I became a filmmaker.”

In a Hong Kong hotel room, she filmed Snowden for some twenty hours, in the course of eight days—twelve minutes of which was re- leased when Snowden first introduced himself to the world. Mathilde Bonnefoy, Poitras’s editor, tells Packer that it was clear from the raw footage “that here was someone who had decided to sacrifice his life, like a suicide.” Bonnefoy realized that the documentary in the works had to be Snowden’s; the painful process of what she calls “shedding characters” took months. Jacob Appelbaum, a “hacktivist” from WikiLeaks—who insisted, as a means of protecting against surveillance, that Packer conduct the interview in a sauna, naked—and Julian Assange, central figures in the early stages of filming, receded. But Snowden also created a problem for Poitras. Having received e-mails and documents from him, she had entered the story, and she knew that the audience needed to understand her participation. Poitras fi- nally decided to record herself reading the messages she received from Snowden. This disembodied voice became the way that she brought herself into the film, as its narrator.

Packer—one of the first outsiders to ever see the film, while Poitras was still finishing it—attended a private screening in Berlin. “Citizen- four” is a political thriller in three acts. The heart of the film, according to Packer, is the hotel room in Hong Kong, where Poitras finds emotion in the small moments that give “Citizenfour” the human truth she’s always after. “In the final sequence, we’re with Snowden in Moscow,” Packer writes. “It begins with a big surprise: his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, has joined him there.” There is little detail about their life there. Packer notes that Mills moved to Moscow in July, and, while she told Poitras that she was willing to be interviewed, Poitras didn’t want to address Snowden’s personal life in the film. “Because Poitras is so close to her subject, politically and psychologically, ‘Citi- zenfour’ is not the tour de force it might have been,” Packer writes. “For Poitras, what gave the story gravity was Snowden. For me, it was Poitras herself.” From the first e-mail she received from Snowden, she disappeared into a world of secrets from which she is only now emerging. “I was sucked into the narrative in a way I have never experienced before,” Poitras tells Packer, “and probably will never experience again.”

A Last Defense Against Genocide

In “The Mission” (p. 60), Jon Lee Anderson travels to the Central African Republic to report on the country’s horrific sectarian civil war, and to assess the French and African intervention, which is providing a template for the newly launched U.N. mission there. Anderson—who in- terviewed fighters on both sides, international lawmakers, and citizens affected by the violence— found most people in agreement that the intervention in the war between the mostly Muslim Seleka rebels and the predominantly Christian antibalaka militia helped thwart a genocide. “But no one thought that tamping down the violence was enough to turn the Central African Re- public into a cohesive state,” Anderson writes. Father Bernard Kinvi, who helps run a Catholic mission in the village of Bossemptele, and who saved hundreds of local people, tells Anderson that the peacekeepers did little to aid his effort. “I am not sure they add much, because when- ever something happens in town, they don’t really help,” he says.

TOM GAULD While local figures like Kinvi served as the most effective bulwark against the violence, the United States did little more than help to air- lift in African Union peacekeeping troops. Samantha Power, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., was among those who argued for greater action. Power tells Anderson that, while peacekeepers neutralized the fighters’ “eliminationist tendencies,” “what we haven’t done yet is stop the suffering of the people of the Central African Republic, or succeed in being everywhere—which means that, on any given day, people are still being targeted for nothing more than their religious identity.” Catherine Samba-Panza, the country’s interim President, tells Anderson that while the recent U.N. peacekeeping mission—called MINUSCA—will put more troops on the ground, the political work will be trickier; the impetus would have to come from outside the country. According to Anderson, most relief officials, political analysts, and diplomats who work in the country doubt, privately, that the U.N. can provide a lasting solution. David Smith, an analyst who has studied the Central African Republic for decades, says, of the U.N., “When it leaves, the country will fall apart like it always does.”

Why Are So Many Animals Now in Places Where They Shouldn’t Be?

In “Pets Allowed” (p. 36), Patricia Marx enlists the help of five unorthodox pets to see just how far she can push society’s ever-increasing embrace of emotional-support animals. The law protects the rights of anyone who has an emotional-support animal—an untrained, and frequently canine, companion that provides solace to someone with a disability, such as anxiety or depression—as long as one has a cor- roborating letter from a health professional. “Fortunately for animal-lovers who wish to abuse the law, there is a lot of confusion about just who and what is allowed where,” Marx writes, noting that one commercial registry signed up eleven thousand emotional-support animals last year—a nearly four-hundred-per-cent increase from 2011. “I decided to go undercover as a person with an anxiety disorder (not a stretch) and run around town with five un-cuddly, non-nurturing animals for which I obtained E.S.A. credentials (one animal at a time; I’m not that crazy).” Armed with the proper paperwork—and always after some back-and-forth with on-site gatekeepers—Marx successfully takes a turtle to Man- hattan’s Frick Collection, a Mexican milk snake to a Chanel boutique, a turkey on the Hampton Jitney, a pig on a commercial flight, and an al- paca to the nineteenth-century home of the painter Frederic Edwin Church. “ ‘Are you going to ruin it for all of us?’ one of my dog-fancying friends asked, when I told her I was writing this article,” Marx, who spoke to multiple advocates for tighter restrictions for fake assistance ani- mals, writes. No animals were harmed during the reporting process, but one journalist did have to get down on her hands and knees to clean her carpet.

Plus: In Comment, Michael Specter examines why the United States’ predictably panicked response to pandemics is not the answer to the Ebola crisis (p. 29); in The Financial Page, James Surowiecki discusses the misleading hype over Netflix, and how the company be- came a financial victim of its own success (p. 34); in Shouts & Murmurs, Paul Rudnick imagines a college-application essay written by a bitter adult (p. 42); Alex Ross considers Beethoven’s profound influence on classical music, and looks at how his singularity may have hindered his successors (p. 44); Louis Menand explores current copyright law, and considers the implications and the benefits of adjust- ing restrictions (p. 84); James Wood reads the work of the Australian novelist Elizabeth Harrower (p. 90); Dan Chiasson reads Louise Glück’s new poetry volume, “Faithful and Virtuous Night” (p. 95); Hilton Als takes in “It’s Only a Play” and “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” (p. 100); Peter Schjeldahl visits “Matisse: The Cut-Outs,” at the Museum of Modern Art (p. 102); Alex Ross reviews “Macbeth” at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic’s Carl Nielsen concert (p. 104); Anthony Lane watches “Birdman” and “Whiplash” (p. 106); and fiction by Kirstin Valdez Quade (p. 74).

Online: On the Political Scene podcast, Dorothy Wickenden discusses the midterm elections with John Cassidy and Ryan Lizza; on the New Yorker Out Loud podcast, Oliver Sacks talks about what he’s learned from hallucinogenic drugs with Sasha Weiss and John Ben- net.

Tablet Extras: The first movement of Carl Nielsen’s Fourth Symphony; a slide show of photographs from the Central African Repub- lic; a slide show of photographs from MOMA’s Matisse retrospective; poems from “Faithful and Virtuous Night”; an excerpt from Eliza- beth Harrower’s “In Certain Circles”; Kirstin Valdez Quade reads her fiction; Sylvia Legris reads her poem; Richard Brody picks his Movie of the Week, Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret,” from 2011.

The October 20, 2014, issue of The New Yorker goes on sale at newsstands beginning Monday, October 13th.