In January 2013, documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras began receiving encrypted e-mails from an anonymous source inside the NSA, identified simply as "CitizenFour". In June 2013, Poitras, together with investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald and veteran Guardian reporter Ewen MacAskill, travelled to Hong Kong to meet the source: a young man who introduced himself as Edward Snowden. Citizenfour plunges audiences into the extraordinary eight days that followed, as Snowden trades in his comfortable career as a security analyst for the life of a fugitive and lets the world in on the massive data collection and surveillance programs run by Western governments. Along with the lone undertaking of whistleblowing, the erosion of privacy and the limits of popular democracies, Citizenfour explores the invisible lines that divide investigative journalism from documentary as an art form. 

The film is the last installment in a trilogy about America’s post-9/11 position in the world, after the Oscar-nominated My Country, My Country (2006), which looks at Iraqi life after the US invasion, and Sundance-winner The Oath (2010, also shown at One World Romania in 2011), which explores the new concentrationary universe spanning from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay through two extraordinary Yemeni destinies.

The documentary has been "adopted" by the Association for Technology and Internet.