If you're interested in the motives behind Edward Snowden's exposure of the U.S. National Security Agency's (NSA) surveillance programs,  Laura Poitras’ Citizenfour—an Oscar nominee for best documentary—is worth your time. The two-hour film follows the Snowden disclosures from the very beginning, starting with Snowden's crytpic and anonymous emails to Poitras indicating he wanted her help in exposing the U.S. government's massive, covert data collection.

In it, we get to know 29-year-old, baby-faced Snowden and his motives. Poitras does an impressive job at simultaneously understating the obvious attempt at vindicating Snowden while still indicting the U.S. and British governments for abuses of data collection capabilities.

Citizenfour is the third installment in a trilogy of documentaries Poitras has produced about the U.S. in the wake of 9/11. The first, My Country, My Country, was about the Iraq war, and earned Poitras an Academy Award nomination. The second, The Oath, dealt with Guantanamo Bay, and drew two Emmy nominations.

Early on, the film introduces Poitras’ collaborators, journalists Glenn Greenwald, who would soon publish No Place to Hide, his book on the Snowden story, and Ewen MacAskill of The Guardian. The two journalists, along with Poitras, meet Snowden in a Hong Kong hotel room where he's holed up, having left his apartment in Hawaii abruptly, knowing he'd soon break the story and be a highly wanted man. Snowden, surprisingly composed given the situation, takes the reporters  through what he knows, showing them the relevant NSA documents they'll release as proof of his accusations. The reporters, often visibly shocked at the information they're viewing, outline their plans for releasing the information.

Throughout the film, the team questions and reaffirms its need to be vigilant regarding the security of its methods and disclosures and the legal hazards of its work.

In some of the introductory shots, Snowden covers his head with a blanket as he works in order to "go dark" and avoid the possibility that the laptop he is working on is being hacked into with cameras. He seems overly paranoid, but the justifications for his precautions become obvious as he describes the material he’s disclosing, later discovering the NSA's tracking of Snowden himself.

Snowden comes across initially as a cautious, unlikely focus for the tidal wave of attention he will soon generate. He chooses his words carefully as he explains his years of high-level intelligence experience for government agencies, including the CIA, the NSA and its contractors, and his justification for his decision to provide voluminous NSA files to journalists. He cites what he sees as a broken promise by President Barack Obama and his administration to bring transparency to the federal government and to respect U.S. citizens’ right to privacy. He expresses fear that the consequences of keeping silent would be complicity in the creation of a world in which there is no privacy at all.

By presenting Snowden’s pronouncements in real time, in quiet conversations in a hotel room, without arrogance or overzealous passion, Poitras negates the public pronouncements characterizing him as a traitor or, for that matter, a man who has any criminal intent whatsoever.

Once Greenwald publishes the first story, Snowden watches from his hotel room the breaking news broadcasts by CNN and myriad other news outlets. Shortly to follow is the whirlwind of government denials and condemnations.  We then watch at Snowden's world changes; he's filmed calling attorneys to inquire about his prospects for asylum under the United Nations in Hong Kong and weighing his next steps. As he does so, he acknowledges that he knew this uproar would occur and describes the steps he took to remain the lone source of the leaks, insulating his girlfriend and family from inclusion in his activities. 

The portrayal refrains from any narrative defense of Snowden’s actions and instead reveals Snowden’s slowly developing apprehension over his tenuous, soon-to-be-short-lived freedom but also a lack of panic or regret. The net effect is a sympathetic portrayal of a man, misguided or not, who views himself as doing the right thing and is only in this moment seeing the monumental consequences of his actions.

The programs Snowden exposed implemented by the U.S. government and GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, ultimately involve, in combination, the attempted access to, monitoring of and retention of metadata about virtually every electronic communication on the planet.

Citizenfour undeniably adds to the public understanding of Snowden’s actions and the programs he exposes in a captivating depiction of the events as they unfolded. It's no wonder the film has been nominated for an Oscar, given the cinematic quality and cohesiveness of the narrative.

As to the ultimate verdict on Snowden in the court of public opinion, the film would be useful as evidence to support any conclusion. It can only be hoped that it reaches a wide enough audience to be seen as more than a sermon to the choir of Snowden’s supporters.