When: May 5, 7.30pm
Where: ACUD MACHT NEU
Admission: 5 € Get Tickets

Following our 29th conference Smart Prisons: Tracking, Monitoring & Control we invite you to join us on May 5 at 7.30 pm for the screening of The Feeling of Being Watched by Assia Boundaoui, introduced by Tatiana Bazzichelli / Disruption Network Lab, and hosted by ACUD MACHT NEU.

“The Feeling of Being Watched" by Assia Boundaoui explores the impact of surveillance on Muslim-American communities in the wake of the War on Terror, and raises important questions about privacy, security, and civil liberties.

THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED - SCREENING

In the Arab-American neighborhood outside of Chicago where director Assia Boundaoui grew up, most of her neighbors think they have been under surveillance for over a decade. While investigating their experiences, Assia uncovers tens of thousands of pages of FBI documents that prove her hometown was the subject of one of the largest counterterrorism investigations ever conducted in the U.S. before 9/11, code-named “Operation Vulgar Betrayal.” With unprecedented access, The Feeling of Being Watched weaves the personal and the political as it follows the filmmaker’s examination of why her community fell under blanket government surveillance. Assia struggles to disrupt the government secrecy shrouding what happened and takes the FBI to federal court to compel them to make the records they collected about her community public. In the process, she confronts long-hidden truths about the FBI’s relationship to her community. The Feeling of Being Watched follows Assia as she pieces together this secret FBI operation, while grappling with the effects of a lifetime of surveillance on herself and her family. 

AFTER THE SCREENING, we invite you to network over drinks at ACUD MACHT NEU, in Berlin-Mitte. This will be an opportunity to connect with others who are interested in the intersection of technology and criminal justice reform, and to share your own insights and perspectives.

Register now!

The Feeling of Being Watched
Documentary (2018), 1h 27min, USA.
Language: English

When journalist Assia Boundaoui investigates rumors of surveillance in her Muslim-American neighborhood in Chicago, she uncovers one of the largest FBI terrorism probes conducted before 9/11 and reveals its enduring impact on her community.

Assia Boundaoui (Filmmaker, DZ/US)

Assia Boundaoui is an Algerian-American investigative journalist and filmmaker. She has reported internationally for PRI, BBC, AlJazeera, VICE and CNN among others. Her debut short film set in an Arab women’s hair salon in Chicago for HBO Documentary Films premiered at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival. Her award-winning feature-length directorial debut, THE FEELING OF BEING WATCHED a documentary investigating a decade of FBI surveillance in Assia's community, had its world premiere at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival and was nationally broadcast on PBS “POV.” Assia was named one of Filmmaker Magazine's 2018 "25 New Faces of Independent Film,” was a 2019 New America National Fellow, in 2020 was honored with the Livingston Award for national reporting, in 2021 was awarded a Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan and in 2022 was awarded a United States Artist fellowship. She was most recently a fellow at the Co-Creation Studio at the MIT Open Documentary Lab, where she incubated a community co-created, site-specific installation, the Inverse Surveillance Project. Assia earned a Masters degree in journalism at New York University and is an Algiers born, Arabic speaking, Chicagoan.

TEAM: www.feelingofbeingwatched.com/team

OFFICIAL WEBSITE: www.feelingofbeingwatched.com