Petra Epperlein and Michael Tucker take a powerfully personal journey through the former East Germany, as Epperlein investigates her father’s 1999 suicide and the possibility that he may have worked as a spy for the dreaded Stasi security service.
Final Warning (1995)
Host Grant Jeffrey discusses how technology and government activities are changing the way our information is handled. How is this shaping our lives?
Die Kinder sind tot (2004)
A documentary exploring a crime that shocked Germany in the summer of 1999.
MLK/FBI (2020)
Based on newly declassified files, the film explores the US government’s surveillance and harassment of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Infinite Place (2024)
Loitz is one of those former GDR towns that still suffer from the effects of German reunification. For a year "Infinite Place" looks behind the gray facade of the seemingly dying town and questions concepts of home and identity through the perspective of its old and new inhabitants. The town’s vacancy and people’s urge for self-realization create a fruitful look into the future.
Stasi, un État contre son peuple (2021)
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, thousands of documents were hastily shredded by the dreaded GDR political police. 16,000 bags filled with six million pieces of paper were found. Thanks to the meticulous work of technology, the destinies of men and women who had been spied on and recorded without their knowledge could be reconstructed.
An Eye on You: Citizens Under Surveillance (NaN)
Do any areas of our lives escape surveillance any more? Citizens of the 21st Century are the focus of prying eyes, whether they agree to it or not.
Change of Scenery (2022)
Born in Germany in 2002, Noa Blanche Beschorner evokes the memory of those who, a generation before her, lived through the separation of East and West Germany. Tapetenwechsel (Change of Scenery) is the story of youth seeking their identity when confronting their collective memory.
Railway Station (1980)
Kieslowski’s later film Dworzec (Station, 1980) portrays the atmosphere at Central Station in Warsaw after the rush hour.
TRANSIT (2010)
In this documentary Angela Zumpe searches for traces of her brother, who moved from west to east Germany in 1968 to live in the DDR but killed himself eight months after.
Cell 364 (2020)
While Germany sits as one of the major democratic models, an ex-prisoner of the Stasi delivers from his former cell a frightening testimony that questions the sustainability of our contemporary democracies.
Watched (2017)
This short 19-minute documentary is an intimate and moving exploration of the profound and far-reaching impact of surveillance on Muslim American individuals and communities. Premiering at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival, WATCHED is told through the personal experience of two women, both coming of age in New York. The film charts the devastating toll of surveillance and reveals the scars it leaves behind.
Erasing David (2009)
David Bond lives in one of the most intrusive surveillance states in the world. He decides to find out how much private companies and the government know about him by putting himself under surveillance and attempting to disappear, a decision that changes his life forever. Leaving his pregnant wife and young child behind, he is tracked across the database state on a chilling journey that forces him to contemplate the meaning of privacy and the loss of it.
Doty (2024)
Richard Doty is a former Air Force Intelligence operative whose job at Kirtland AFB in New Mexico involved creating and disseminating disinformation about the existence of extraterrestrial spacecraft to UFO researchers. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Kirtland AFB was home to a wide range of highly classified technology experiments involving lasers, stealth aircraft, and nuclear weapons. Strange phenomena in the skies above the base piqued the interest of amateur and professional UFO investigators. Doty’s job was to recruit UFO researchers to be informants to the Air Force about goings-on in the UFO community and to spread military disinformation about UFOs among their peers. To accomplish this, Doty supplied fake documents to UFO investigators purporting to tell the “truth” about government involvement with extraterrestrials.
Your Face is Ours: The Dangers of Facial Recognition Software (2023)
New York-based tech company Clearview AI is working to identify and compile the faces of every human being on the planet. The firm claims that its database will serve as a force for good, helping to solve crimes and prevent espionage. But what if Clearview AI’s powerful facial recognition software, that could potentially be used for mass surveillance and profiling, fell into the wrong hands? What if it already has?
La Brigada – A Mural for the Unidad Popular in Dresden (1976)
During the 16th Workers' Festival in Dresden in 1976, a student group of Chilean emigrants paints a mural symbolically depicting the activity of the Unidad Popular during Salvador Allende's reign. Festival guests comment on this work. Music by Chilean music group Jaspampa, formed in Leipzig in 1972.