ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED

Laura Poitras is a film maker and journalist. CITIZENFOUR, the third instalment of her post-9/11 trilogy, won an Academy Award for Best Documentary. Part one of the trilogy, MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY, about the US occupation of Iraq, was nominated for an Academy Award. Part two, THE OATH, focused on Guantanamo and the “war on terror,” and was nominated for two Emmy awards. ALL THE BEAUTY AND THE BLOODSHED, her collaboration with legendary artist/activist Nan Goldin, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2022. Her reporting on the NSA’s global mass surveillance won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with The Guardian and Washington Post. She has received many other honours for her work, including a MacArthur “genius” fellowship and a Peabody Award. In 2006, the US government placed her on a secret terrorist watchlist and for six years she was detained and interrogated at the US border each time she travelled internationally. According to heavily redacted FBI documents obtained by Laura Poitras through a lawsuit, the FBI conducted physical surveillance of her and launched a classified investigation. In 2014, in the aftermath of the NSA/Snowden revelations, high-level CIA officials lobbied to designate Laura as an “information broker” and “agent of a foreign power” to pave the way for her prosecution. The effort was not carried out.