Laura Poitras on her career, complex politics, and the power of images over words

Poitras and Nyrabia go way back, having met in 2012 when he arrived in Berlin after being imprisoned in Syria.

"I just think it's important to know that the person who's organizing this festival is a filmmaker who has put his life on the line many times," said Poitras at the very beginning of the talk.

Before going into her filmography, Poitras talked about her beginnings. After working as a chef for ten years, she took a course in filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she learned about avant-garde cinema, "very much from the tradition of Stan Brakhage or Maya Derren," she explained.

Later she worked as a projectionist, which was a great way to learn about cinema, as she put it.

Her first film, made in collaboration with Linda Goode Bryant, was 2003's Flag Wars, set in Columbus, Ohio, where two marginalized and oppressed groups were pitted against each other: the predominantly working-class Black neighborhood was being gentrified by white, gay men. The title of the film comes from the fact that when the newcomers started putting up Pride Flags, the residents responded by hanging up Black nationalist flags.

"We were interested in how two communities that experience violence and marginalization get along," Poitras recalled. "Will their experience make them better neighbors or will other forces—class, money—override those differences? And do they also perpetuate forms over discrimination against other groups?"

Working on this film was a crucial learning process for Poitras. It dealt with numerous, multi-layered ethical questions, but also represented a challenge on a practical level.

"It's a very close community; we couldn't conceal anything. If we were filming with one person, others could see us filming," she explained.

It was also her first experience with a feature-length film.

"We thought we would shoot it over the summer, and four years later, we were still filming," she remembered.

"It was the film that taught me what is a story and what is storytelling. It's not that we knew where this was going to take us, but we did ask people to follow them over time and through that process of surrendering, we found the story. It took us places that we didn't anticipate," she said.

When Nyrabia mentioned that she is one of the rare filmmakers from a democratic country who has paid a huge cost for her freedom of expression, analogous to what artists in repressive societies are experiencing, Poitras countered: "I think that one of my main jobs is to expose the myth of American exceptionalism throughout my work and to show how power works in different types of ways."

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 happened while Poitras and Bryant were editing Flag Wars.

"There was a sense this was going to change our global paradigm," she recalled. "A lot of what unfolded was in secret and there's a lot of things that we now know: that the NSA immediately decided it was going to attempt global surveillance, that the use of torture was being literally legalized in those first days. And then mapping out of the upcoming invasion of Iraq started, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

"For me as an American, it was terrifying to witness that we're proposing to invade a country because we think it might do something. There was this obscene contradiction: we're going to occupy you but it's only to bring you freedom."

At the same time, as she put it, mainstream journalism collapsed, with the media just repeating the government's talking points.

"I felt the need to respond, especially to the idea of liberating these people by putting them in cages. It's insane that the press wasn't more critical of it, even to the point that news organizations wouldn't even use the word torture, it was always 'interrogation techniques'. So I felt compelled to make something about what was happening," she said.

This is how she started working on My Country, My Country. She was able to get on an army plane to Iraq in summer 2004—by then the infamous Abu Ghraib photos were already released, and she hinted that the army at that moment probably thought it couldn't get much worse than that.

This is where she met her protagonist, Dr. Riyadh, a member of the local government.

"He is an extraordinary man, he was one of the few people I met who was really vocally critical about the occupation, and yet, he was participating in local government. He wanted to participate in Iraqi self-determination and yet he was completely critical of what the US army was doing and the way they were doing it," she said.

The film includes the elections organized by the US Army, and Poitras says she was completely cynical in the beginning.

"But I had to re-evaluate that cynicism when I saw what he was willing to do and risks he was willing to take. USA destroyed their country for generations, but there was something that he and others were willing to risk. This was a shift I experienced, something I never felt before," she explained.

Many people who were sent to the Guantanamo Bay in the period were Yemenis, so for her next film, 2010's The Oath, Poitras went to Yemen. There she met Abu Jandal, Osama Bin Laden's former driver and bodyguard.

"It was not a simple story of an innocent person who was locked up and tortured. It was much more complicated and interesting," she recalled. "But I felt at the same time it was a dangerous story, maybe not the narrative the world needs right now."

It turned out that Abu Jandal was in prison in Yemen at the time of 9/11, but he was interrogated by the FBI immediately after it. And in this interrogation, he shared a lot of information without being tortured.

"So the US government had actual knowledge of somebody in the immediate aftermath that they never needed to waterboard, there was no real reason to have black sites and torture people. It's just pure retaliation, and it's not a productive way to learn anything," she said.

Even though she was afraid that this topic was "radioactive," a public television station in the US funded the film.

"I really thought I would be blacklisted, but I wasn't. I ended up on a different kind of list: the Terrorist Watch List, and this was because I was seen in the Red Zone with my camera, so they decided I'm a threat to national security. I always include that when I do my bio, and that's because I'm proud of it: it means I'm doing something that's causing them some discomfort and that I'm in a good company with people who were surveyed by the US government."

This notion of "good company" served as a segue to Nyrabia to go into the Top 10 Films Poitras compiled for IDFA as Guest of Honor.

"It's not a top 10 of my favorite films—I don't think I could make that list—but I did think I could select a group of films that are indelible, that moved me, that made me think about my world as a filmmaker. They are organized around the question of state violence and representation, and they approach this from many different perspectives," she explained.

Poitras especially highlighted Jafar Panahi's This Is Not a Film for the way in which it represented the state violence, and Pirjo Honkasalo's The 3 Rooms of Melancholia for its portrayal of childhood masculinity and the central, haunting chapter in which a woman gives her children away because she is dying.

"Good company" could also refer to what Nyrabia called her next period of filmmaking: Citizenfour with Edward Snowden and Risk with Julian Assange.

After the audience saw a clip from Citizenfour, Poitras recalled: "There was a way to get us the material without filming the encounter, which would have been on many levels safer for Snowden and me and Glenn [Greenwald] and everybody who was there. But he wasn't interested in protecting his anonymity, he was interested in making sure we reported on the global mass surveillance programs.

"I knew that the meeting would allow us to verify things with him as a source, and if he didn't do it, the government would be writing the narrative for us."

Greenwald and Poitras were more than surprised to learn Snowden was only 29.

"In retrospect, his youth was wonderful, because people then related to how someone so young risks so much. And obviously his brilliance and intelligence and the way he spoke about why he did what he did: he says, 'I feel good in my human experience knowing I can contribute.' It would have unfolded very differently if he didn't reveal his identity and let others make the narrative," Poitras explained.

But work on Citizenfour actually interrupted the film she had already began making: Risk.

"I moved out of the US because I couldn't secure my footage from border interrogations, and then Snowden contacted me. I never told Assange about him, and we thought it was maybe going to be one film, but in editing we realized it couldn't be. But I thought it was important to emphasize the dangers of journalism, that the US wanted to extradite Assange and imprison him for publishing truthful information about US occupations and war crimes. I believe that what the US government is doing is the greatest danger to press freedom. It's also very personal, everything that you read as an indictment is something I could be accused of," she elaborated.

For Nyrabia, Poitras' last film, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which won the Golden Lion at Venice and screens in IDFA’s Best of Fests, is a continuation of her filmography and, at the same time, a beginning of a new period.

"There are many overlaps and then some differences," Poitras replied. "I'm really proud to work alongside Nan [Goldin], and she's a collaborator on this film in a way that is different. She has a lot of public-facing bravery that I've had in other films, but there's a real emotional vulnerability that she brings that was extraordinary for me to work with, and tell her story that's both deeply political and deeply personal."

Nyrabia commented how Poitras has with time become also very active politically, having co-founded The Intercept, in addition to her other activistic and lobbying roles. But she seems to always go back to filmmaking.

"This is the only field that feels like I have any experience and skills in. It's what I return to: what you can say with images and how images can communicate something about the world that words can't. If we just see it, maybe we'll change something. We know that the US is torturing people, that Guantanamo is still open, but seeing it maybe it will change something."