[WATCH] 'Citizenfour': The Edward Snowden Documentary TRAILER Shocks Viewers!

Edward Snowden chronicler Laura Poitras has made a much-anticipated documentary that is both an intimate portrayal of Snowden's life, but also a story of the United States surveillance operations. Poitras's Citizenfour film has made headlines since premiering at the New York Film Festival this past Friday, Oct 10. Perhaps not surprisingly, the film is now striking up conversations about our already questionable government.

The film, which will be released this coming Oct. 24, takes an in-depth look at how and why Snowden decided to pull back the curtains on the National Security Agency. Watch the trailer for Citizenfour below:

"It's absolutely staggering and beyond what you can ever imagine," Poitras explained during the Saturday NYFF interviews. "There's the scope and desire of collecting all of this data, and also the mentality that if they have all communications they have these repositories they can query later. It's shocking, really."

Poitras gives viewers a detailed explanation of how the American government uses metadata to track phone conversations of its citizens. She also depicts the government officials themselves testifying that the government does not in fact spy on it's citizens.

The film also shows Guardian's journalist Gleen Greenwald being told by Snowden, "This is not science fiction...This is happening right now."

"The film is made with enormous risks not just to myself," Poitras said. "But to Snowden, Glenn and William Binney [a former NSA worker] it's easy to look at it in retrospect and say these stories and documents were going to get out, but there was a lot of fear and danger."

The documentary focuses on Snowden in the now infamous Hong Kong hotel room and reasons being told by himself that he feels there's a great threat to the future of American free speech if he did not come forward. "The elected and the electorate...The ruler and the ruled."

Poitras has received many awards for her work such as My Country, My Country that was nominated for an Academy Award.