Eight years after her triumph with Citizenfour (2014), American filmmaker Laura Poitras is back on the Oscar trail with her short, Terror Contagion, which is one of the films included in Neon’s portmanteau feature The Year Of The Everlasting Storm.
The new film, made in conjunction with London-based Forensic Architecture, explores the nefarious activities of Israeli technology group NSO Group Technologies, the company behind the Pegasus spyware which, human rights activists have shown, enables “state terror.” Repressive regimes use Pegasus to target and harass their critics. First comes the digital intimidation. Often, physical violence will follow.
Forensic Architecture’s founding director Eyal Weizman and one of its lead researchers Shourideh C. Molavi had approached Poitras early during the pandemic to ask if she wanted to work on a project about the NSO Group.
“I’ve known their work for many years and I had collaborated with them before on another film called Triple Chaser,” Poitras says of the organisation. “Their close friends and colleagues were all getting targeted by Pegasus. It [the project] was personal. It was really close to home.”
At first, Poitras didn’t know how she would be able to help. ”I can’t travel. How can I make a film about an Israeli cyber-weapons company with targets all over the world without being able to travel?” she asked.
Serendipitously, at almost exactly the same time, Neon (the US distributor that had just had such a huge success with its Oscar winner Parasite) approached Poitras, inviting her to contribute a short to a film under lockdown. This [the Everlasting Storm project] was being executive produced by Iranian director Jafar Panahi.
As in the late 1990s when Scandinavian Dogme directors signed their “vow of chastity” and agreed to make films under very specific constraints, the filmmakers involved in The Year Of The Everlasting Storm agreed to certain stipulations. “They gave us a bunch of rules,” Poitras remembers. “You have to film in your place of lockdown; you can’t leave; you can’t film in public. It has to be in real-time and so, if you use the internet, you have to show it. I don’t know [but] creatively I was really intrigued by this.”
Poitras’ worries about not being able to travel soon vanished as she realised she could make this documentary effectively from home.
What motivates the NSO Group? Is it ideology, is it profit? Does it do the bidding of the Israeli government? On its website, NSO insists that it has strong safeguards against the misuse of its technology. Critics dismiss this as nonsense.
“They’ve been caught in so many lies I’ve lost count,” Poitras dismisses the Group’s attempts to defend its activities and to pass on the blame.
When it comes to cases like that of the murdered Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi, whose friends and colleagues were targeted with Pegasus spyware, NSO tries to wriggle off the hook. Their explanations don’t always make sense. One moment, they’ll say they didn’t know the hacking was going on. The next, they will say they shut down rogue accounts. “It can’t be both. You can’t say you don’t know and then shut down accounts after.”
Poitras describes the industry in which the Group operates as one of “digital mercenaries. You have Blackwater [the American private military company], you have the military mercenaries and now you have this new category of digital mercenaries who have nation state level weapons. This is a really dangerous industry. A lot of people have called for it to be shut down and I totally agree with that.”
“What is really disturbing about this kind of digital violence is the link between the digital violence and actual real-world physical violence. That is what Forensic Architecture wanted to understand,” Poitras continues.
The director reached out to the NSO Group for comment but none of their representatives wanted to speak to her.
Poitras herself has direct experience of being surveilled and knows the toll it takes.
“Yeah, of course. Having been targeted, you know the violence it creates, not just to you as an individual but to your network of people and friends.”
Many of those Poitras talked to during her research are journalists who have sources who trust them. Pegasus can blow these sources’ identities and expose them to extreme risk. There have also been cases of lawyers being targeted by the spyware.
This, then, is a very dangerous world. Most filmmakers love to win Oscars for the prestige they confer and for the endorsement of their work by their peers. In Poitras’ case, Academy Awards mean something very different. They potentially offer her a new layer of protection. After all, she is a filmmaker with a very political vision who has been put on a government terror watchlist. At one stage, she discovered, the CIA considered re-classifying her and her colleague Glenn Greenwald as ‘information brokers’ rather than as journalists. That way, it would have been easier to target and prosecute them.
“For me, having some support from my colleagues in the filmmaking community is beneficial because I think it helps protect me,” she suggests of why awards matter to her.
No, Poitras never anticipated that Citizenfour would win an Oscar but she was glad that it did. Another upside was that Academy Awards helps documentaries to get seen.
She also regards herself as an artist. Her films are about more than their messages. She pays attention to aesthetics too, describing them as “really important.”
What did Poitras think about the way she was portrayed on screen by actress Melissa Leo in Oliver Stone’s movie Snowden (2016). “We don’t need to go into that question,” she parries the inquiry. This, it seems, isn’t a movie she much admires. “Oliver Stone, if I had been involved in that decision, is not the filmmaker I would have approached…”
And, yes, she is still in touch with whistle blower Edward Snowden and he is doing ‘really well.’
“I think he was prepared for the worst case outcomes. I think we all were prepared for the worst case outcomes,” Poitras says of their expectations after Snowden leaked top secret information from the US National Security Agency. Thankfully, those worst case outcomes didn’t come to pass.
