AFPFugitive intelligence analyst Edward Snowden, who was granted asylum by Moscow after revealing the extent of US government surveillance, has been reunited with his American girlfriend in Russia. A two-hour documentary by Laura Poitras paints an intimate and sympathetic portrait of Snowden holed up in a Hong Kong hotel as he blows the whistle on National Security Agency dealings and then plots his escape. The movie, shown at advance screenings in New York late Friday, is due for release in theaters on October 24. The film says Snowden's longtime partner Lindsay Mills joined him in Moscow in July. She is shown preparing
dinner with Snowden in a wood-paneled kitchen, but the couple's conversation is not recorded and she is not interviewed. Kremlin-connected lawyer Anatoly Kucherena confirmed that Snowden had been reunited with his long-time girlfriend. "Love is love," he told AFP. The whereabouts of a woman who formerly referred to herself on a blog as "a world-traveling, pole-dancing super hero" were not previously known. She has never spoken publicly about her boyfriend, who has been charged in the United States with espionage, and some reports had suggested that the couple had parted company. But the documentary "Citizenfour" hints at a much closer union. It shows Snowden breaking the news online to Mills from Hong Kong that he would not be back anytime soon after she told him agents had turned up at their home in Hawaii, suspicious about his absence from work. "It's a tough situation," he says, close to tears on his hotel bed after telling Mills that he "may not be coming back." "She has no idea (what I'm doing," he says. He says he feels "badly" about simply disappearing while she was on vacation but said he did it to protect her. After the NSA surveillance story breaks, the couple is still in touch. Mills tells him that his rent checks are no longer going through, which he calls "strange" because they had been set up automatically, and that trucks are all over the street outside their home.