2023, reason to shine: Poitras will be a guest at the Venice Film Festival with her film “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”.Image: www.imago-images.de
interview
The director once accompanied Edward Snowden during his revelations and stubbornly fights against the misconduct of the American government. Now she is coming to Switzerland for the documentary film festival Visions du Réel. She had a Zoom talk with us.
April 12, 2026, 2:55 p.mApril 12, 2026, 2:55 p.m
When you look out the window and see the sad mess that is America right now, do you feel frustrated, angry, or incited to resist?
Laura Poitras: I’m really angry. I have been critical of the American government for so long, its activities overseas, its self-imposed wars – and in retrospect they have always proven to be disasters. It’s difficult not to lose hope.
I can think of two hopefuls. One is the soon-to-be 89-year-old investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who covered the My Lai massacre in 1969 and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal in 2004. You portray him in your current film “Cover-Up”. And at the anti-Trump demonstrations in the USA, the most prominent activist is 88-year-old Jane Fonda.
I completely agree with that, this generation has historical foresight, recognizes the connections and actually spreads hope. But the boys also give me hope. When I look at the protests against ICE’s reign of terror, I see so many young people organizing, protesting, protecting their neighbors, and documenting ICE’s crimes and sharing them with the world.
Resilient activists: Jane Fonda and Joan Baez protest in Washington at the end of March 2026.Image: keystone
In contrast to classic media such as the “Washington Post”?
Absolutely! But for once I blame Jeff Bezos, not Donald Trump. It’s this club of billionaires trying to rule the world. I don’t understand why the good old Washington Post could be sold to Bezos, who got rich by destroying our retail industry. He has no experience in journalism and is now ruining a major media company. In other countries there is no freedom of the press, but here we do, it is enshrined in the First Amendment, and I don’t understand why the press doesn’t use it, but bows to those in power and practices self-censorship.
Her topics are surveillance, the so-called war on terror, which itself seems to produce nothing but terror, and how people are lied to and deceived. Has the level of lies, confusion and deception increased under the current administration?
I’m not sure it has increased. It’s part of an American pattern: lying about your wars has a long tradition in this country. First there is violence, then there is impunity. Nobody will be held accountable. What’s new under Trump, however, are these shameless full-throttle attacks on institutions, which is frightening.
Her motto as a documentary filmmaker is very short: facts count.
Yes Yes Yes! Facts count! And: I want to show people who change something through direct action, through whistleblowing or through journalism. That inspires me. For example, the artist Nan Goldin: She used her great influence in the art world to do something truly amazing. It destroyed the name and reputation of the Sackler pharmaceutical dynasty, which had committed mass murder for two decades by selling the highly addictive painkiller OxyContin and earned billions from it. That wasn’t a secret. But the Sacklers had cleared their name by being charitable and investing a lot of money in the art world, especially in museums. Nan Goldin brought them down. It has taken all the shame away from the victims and effectively thrown it back on the Sacklers and the museums, on the profiteers (as seen in Poitras’ film “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed”).
Can I get back to the facts? Facts are easy to manipulate these days. Does that scare you?
Yes of course, this is all very alarming. I am a filmmaker who works fact-based and archival material. I have to be extremely vigilant so I know whether I can trust my material or not. Because it’s like this: images can change everything. And we have to handle it very carefully.
Speaking of images that change something: As a professional documentary filmmaker, how did you perceive the images from Minneapolis? When we witnessed Renée Good and Alex Pretti being executed?
The activists who captured and disseminated this with their handheld cameras did incredibly important work. We would not have known about the executions and would never have seen an ICE employee Alex Pretti shot from behind if these videos didn’t exist. The activists themselves risked their lives documenting the attackers. This is civil courage and civil journalism and is incredibly important for resistance against the government. We also only know about the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis because a young woman took out her cell phone and filmed it.
Laura Poitras at the Swiss documentary film festival Visions du Réel
After your film “My Country, My Country” about the consequences of the American invasion of Iraq, you were placed on a terrorist watch list. You were considered a terrorist of the highest level and were harassed until you went into exile in Berlin. What gave you the strength to never give up?
When I found out in 2006 that I was on this watch list, I made a decision: I would not let it stop me from doing my work. I refused. I’m a journalist, but also an artist, and art is about finding an expression for your feelings. My work is always my outlet for my anger, my rage, my indignation about what America is doing wrong. When you give up and give in to despair, that is also a privilege.
A privilege?
There is this one scene in “Cover-Up”: Seymour Hersh is on the phone with an informant in Gaza. She says: «My friends are dying. I can’t leave her now.” You can’t afford to give up hope. You have to keep fighting, believe that change is possible. If we simply let a catastrophe happen, the consequences will also shape the future.
Jennifer Aniston has nothing to do with “Citizenfour,” the Oscar-winning Edward Snowden documentary by Laura Poitras (and her co-producers Dirk Wilutsky and Mathilde Bonnefoy), she just presented the award and wanted to be in the picture.Image: www.imago-images.de
The basis of your work is trust. Between you and your sources. What is your recipe?
Source protection is everything. This becomes the subject of “Cover-Up”: Seymour Hersh refused to work with us for twenty years because he didn’t trust us. Then he trusted us in theory, but it was so bad for him when we rummaged through his old notebooks and asked him uncomfortable questions that he wanted to stop filming altogether.
Did you know back then that the film would be on Netflix?
No, we had no idea. Netflix bought the film immediately after our premiere at the Venice Film Festival and didn’t ask for a single change, it was a hugely positive experience. Now it runs in 190 countries and in dozens of languages.
You don’t always trust your sources either. Or what about when a former intelligence official named Edward Snowden contacted you for the first time on January 17, 2013 and wanted to talk to you about the NSA’s surveillance and espionage network?
At that time he contacted me in Berlin by email and under changing pseudonyms, one of them was Citizenfour. My gut feeling immediately believed him; I thought: This is a whistleblower who is in incredible danger and who I can trust. And that I have to be incredibly careful. Not only was he risking his life, he was risking mine too.
Edward Snowden (left) and journalist Glenn Greenwald prepare Snowden’s NSA revelations in a room at the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong in June 2013.Image: www.imago-images.de
And what did your head say?
My head told me: Be careful, this could be an FBI trap. The FBI has a long history of infiltrating and enticing dissidents and critics of the system to commit crimes. At that time I also worked with Julian Assange (for the film “Risk”). And I had received information that the CIA was planning to remove and arrest me in Berlin. The third possibility was that my informant was simply one of the many crazy people who contacted me.
And then you decided to risk it all.
Yes. I couldn’t do nothing.
The result was that you traveled to Hong Kong to see Snowden together with the journalist Glenn Greenwald and helped facilitate and document his whistleblowing. You ultimately returned to America with a Pulitzer Prize for particularly valuable “public service” and an Oscar for your film “Citizenfour.”
I hadn’t expected that at all, it was a huge surprise, I had expected other possibilities, one of them being that I would go to prison for this film. But I always believe in work. And the work is more important than the fear.
But did the Oscar help you regain a certain amount of freedom and dignity?
He was a huge “Fuck you!” to the government, I was proud of that, I think everyone there was hoping for a different outcome to the Oscars. It was a victory: for Snowden’s decision, for investigative journalism, for filmmaking, for critical reporting on the government. It was a win and I’m proud of it.
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