In January 2013, filmmaker Laura Poitras starts receiving encrypted emails from someone calling himself Citizen Four. Weeks later she and journalist Glenn Greenwald fly to Hong Kong and meet him in a hotel room: Edward Snowden, a contractor for the NSA with thousands of classified documents proving the agency's mass surveillance of ordinary phone and internet traffic, American and foreign alike. Poitras's camera stays in that room as Snowden decides how to release the material, watches the story break on television, and calculates what happens to his life once his name is public. There are no reenactments and no outside narrator explaining what it all means; the film is built from the footage she shot as it happened, plus later scenes with Greenwald's reporting and NSA whistleblower William Binney. The tension is procedural and real: hotel phones unplugged, fire alarms treated as possible surveillance, a man watching his own disclosure become a geopolitical event in real time.