Commentary: ‘Citizenfour’s’ Berlin premiere puts new spin on Edward Snowden

Since it premiered at the New York Film Festival last month, Laura Poitras’ “Citizenfour,” about the dramatic life and choices of Edward Snowden, has been something of a strange bird. To the (somewhat self-selected) group that’s seen or taken a keen interest in it, it’s been one of the most important and brave movies of the year, a film that brings home in a chilling way our current all-too-true narrative of surveillance. To many others, it’s passed by unremarkably. To that group, the film is a blip, either making them wonder why we’re talking about Snowden again or, for the more engagedly skeptical, why we’re glorifying a traitor.

Not insignificantly, the film, which opened in U.S. theaters two weeks ago, has also confounded some of the usual political divides. People who tilt decidedly right-libertarian have embraced it, as have people who tilt decidedly left-liberal -- its criticisms of big government and security hawkishness play, respectively, to each side. But those closer to the middle have struggled with it, and certainly the D.C. establishment has been discomfited by Snowden in general; you won’t find Ari Fleischer and Barack Obama in the same movie very often, much less agreeing.

Watching “Citizenfour” a second time at the Berlin premiere Wednesday night, though, had a different effect. Both the policy and the politics of it fell away. It became clearer what the movie’s appeal was, how that appeal worked and ultimately, perhaps, where it can take the film.

The backstory to “Citizenfour” is a homegrown one. Poitras moved to Berlin several years ago and cut the film here, immersing the producers and editors she worked with in her world for over a year. There were so many local crew and helpers on stage with her after the screening Wednesday that I lost count (probably about 35). This city is also, for a mix of reasons, ground zero for the pro-Snowden movement.

But it wasn’t politics that shone through Wednesday night. At the New York screening, I was taken with the import of what Snowden was doing, running through what I knew about the story and comparing the new information to what I already knew, how it fleshed out or contradicted that. In more reflective moments I thought about the issues -- the vast surveillance machine and what it means.

A second viewing operated differently. It made me see why Snowden was so compelling to so many in the first place, regardless of the position one takes on him or the National Security Agency. For all of his, and Poitras’, grand ambition to change how we think about government, the film’s neat trick is that it works most at a human level -- which may be why (beyond the self-selection) those who see it come away with warm feelings toward its main character.

As he lays out the stakes and describes the NSA’s activities, Snowden reminds that it is not “my story ... but everyone’s story.” Yet the movie is, indeed, very much his story. Watching him take the action he does -- walk away from a lucrative career and a nice life at the age of 29 because of an ideal -- makes us wonder if we would do the same, no matter the particular context. It’s a kind of aspirational viewing, a rooting for someone because he does the thing we’d like to think we’d do but suspect we might not.

That may be one reason the interest in Snowden personally has been so high, and why the seemingly after-the-fact detail in the film that his girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, is living with him in Moscow has been so touted. You see, that closing moment seems to be saying, you can walk away from it all and still have a happy life. At the screening Poitras said that the last time she talked to Snowden, in September, he was in a good state of mind. It drew a relieved and appreciative reaction from the audience.

The German lens is a particularly interesting one through which to view “Citizenfour.” The fact that popular Chancellor Angela Merkel is the closest thing the film has to a governmental hero enhances its standing, as does the country’s very recent history with rampant spying (albeit of the lower-tech version) via the Stasi. There was a pointed quality to the movie being shown in the Kino International, the old East German, silver-curtained theater where high-ranking members of the GDR used to gather for screenings. This is a movie theater more associated with government surveillance than almost any other in the Western world, and yet on its screen Snowden was battling against just that -- “fitting” Poitras noted before the screening.

This film has long been lauded as a kind of great documentary hope, transcending the many other nonfiction stories that have found their way onto TV (and Netflix and other platforms) in recent years. The jury is still out. The packed handful of U.S. theaters in Week 1 became a much sparser couple dozen theaters in Week 2. If “Citizenfour” does catch on, though, its aspirational quality might have a lot to do with it. Ditto for the academy, which is widely thought to be faced with a choice between this film and the Roger Ebert movie “Life Itself” for the year’s best documentary. The two might be different in a lot of ways, but in our identification with a central character, and the feeling the film leaves of wanting to lead a life much like the one we’re watching, they’re not all that dissimilar.

Someone after the screening asked Poitras if Snowden would ever be allowed to come to Germany. The former NSA contractor enjoys huge popular support here (even though most members of the U.S.-allied German government would sooner rebuild the Berlin Wall than give sanctuary to a man so wanted across the pond). “Citizenfour” viewers want a happy ending for Snowden -- because they believe in his politics, maybe, but also because we’d all like to believe that if you take an idealistic risk, things will turn out OK.

Twitter: @ZeitchikLAT