Festivals/Awards:
Screenings: Rotterdam International Film Festival/ Mandagsdokumentar/ International Documentary
Film Festival Amsterdam/ Bergen International Film festival/ Dokufest Prizren/ Giffoni Film Festival/ Warszawa, Against Gravity/ San Sebastian human rights film festival/ ZagrebDox
Director's Bio-Filmography:
Jakob Gottschau, director şi proprietar al companiei Express TV-production, specializată în filme documentare şi având sediul în Copenhaga, este un cineast, câştigător al multor premii. Cu proiecţii în peste 50 de ţări, a câştigat un premiu Oscar pentru cea mai bună producţie daneză de film documentar cu 100 years of immigration. A fost co-producător al filmului Tracking down the Holy War, o poveste despre Islamul radical. Late lessons from early warnings, Bringing life to space Cyberwar, When the ice disappear şi cel mai recent, Facebookistan, tratează chestiuni sociale şi de mediu.
Director's / Curator's Statement:
„My intention with this film is to give a new and refreshing understanding on how Facebook governs the biggest public space for discourse in the world against a backdrop of openness and transparency. For almost two years I worked on a three part series of halfhour documentaries exploring how social media and Facebook gave a democratic voice to people in repressive countries. It was a kind of ode to the new media which had opened up horizontal communication amongst people on a scale never seen before. But whilst making these films I began to question the mechanisms behind some of the US IT giants, in particular Facebook. At the same time, a good friend of mine had his Facebook account shut down because he had posted a 50 year old picture of some happy nude hippies. He had great difficulty in getting any explanation from Facebook; the company basically didn’t communicate with their users at all. This sparked the beginning of my research into Facebook’s censorship of its users, exploring how the company handles core democratic values, like freedom of expression and privacy. I wanted to find out whether the company behaves in a transparent and accountable way. During the research I came across a phrase which struck me, and which still resonates strongly: that, “They know so much about us and we know so little about them”. Given this enormous IT company has become such an integral part of our daily lives, we should know and understand how they work, and for what purpose. Facebook as social media space no 1 is, de facto, a monopoly, and the company has collected and saved enormous amounts of information about all of us 1.4 billion users over the last eleven years. We have voluntarily shared information on the walls provided by Facebook, and we have voluntarily allowed Facebook, by signing their Terms of Service, to use this information for whatever purpose the company might find useful. And yet we know very little about Facebook, how it controls the world's biggest public space, how and why it censors pages, how they commercialize our personal data and how and why they keep the data, even when we as users have deleted it. This film will investigate the paradox of this social media, which promotes openness and transparency, which encourages all of us to share but which doesn’t share back.Transparency and accountability are key parameters, when it comes to public trust. I will try to reveal how Facebook performs within these parameters by shining a light on people who have been punished by Facebook for violating the company’s rules and by talking to those who have challenged Facebook’s control of all our personal stories. This film will be the journey of the outlaws of Facebookistan.“ (Jakob Gottschau)