Filmmakers explore surveillance circles

‘I want to interrogate power’

BERLIN, June 20, (AP): American filmmaker Laura Poitras, known for her award-winning 2014 documentary on former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden and his revelations about the National Security Agency, has once again turned her camera on the watchmen.

In an exhibition that opened Friday in Berlin, Poitras examines the way the state monitors citizens’ lives — both abroad and at home, in New York City.

While her early work on the war in Iraq and the US government surveillance apparatus — including the Oscar-winning “Citizenfour” — follows the long trail of the Sept. 11 attacks, Poitras’ new show grapples with the issues of the past year: The COVID-19 pandemic and the fight for racial justice.

The goal remains, Poitras said, to “create experience that has emotional resonance.”

“I want to interrogate power,” she told The Associated Press in an interview ahead of the show’s launch.

Together with artist Sean Vegezzi, Poitras puts viewers outside an NYPD outpost in Queens used by the Technical Assistance Response Unit, whose role is to monitor political protests. The unit employs military technology to gather intelligence, including on recent Black Lives Matter rallies, but officers seem unaware that they are being watched as they enter and leave the building.

A second video combines exterior shots of the Vernon C. Bain prison barge on the East River with three months of intercepted radio recordings between guards discussing the apparent use of force against inmates. The crowded prison — set up as a temporary facility almost three decades ago — saw high death rates from COVID-19 last year.

Poitras and Vegezzi said they were surprised that the prison’s continued existence and the conditions there haven’t been taken up by local politicians, given that most of the inmates are local residents awaiting trial for minor crimes.

“As a New Yorker I hope that it’s difficult to look at this prison ship and know that you are complicit in it,” Poitras said, admitting: “We are interested in getting this shut down.”

The series is completed with a visit to little-known

Hart Island, home to one of the largest mass grave sites in the United States with burials dating back to the Civil War era. Vegezzi, whose brother was among a prison detail from Rikers Island tasked with burying the dead, used a drone to show how detainees with little social distancing or protective equipment stacked coffins in deep trenches at the height of the pandemic. The Department of Corrections halted the practice after it became public last year.

The triptych’s bleak, distanced footage contrasts with Poitras’ 25-minute film “Terror Contagion” about Israeli spyware company NSO and its alleged role in the monitoring of activists around the world. Rights groups including Amnesty International claim that the company’s technology has been licensed by repressive regimes to infiltrate the phones of dissidents and journalists, a charge that NSO rejects.

Collaborators

The film was made together with the research group Forensic Architecture, which says its members and collaborators have been hacked using the NSO spyware Pegasus. The group plans to release a broader investigation into the company next month.

Since the start of the pandemic, NSO has sought to apply its technology — originally designed to hunt down terrorists — to COVID-tracking tools, alarming human rights activists.

“The pandemic rules and surveillance technology are definitely going to be exploited and normalized in future,” said Poitras.

The filmmaker was herself the subject of intense surveillance by the US government that started after she visited Baghdad in 2004 for her film “My Country, My Country.” After coming under heightened scrutiny for her work with Snowden, who remains in exile in Russia, Poitras was based for years in Berlin, a city she chose to return to for this latest exhibition.

The German capital has its own grim history of state surveillance. The show’s gallery is located in the formerly communist-controlled east of the city. It also lies just a few hundreds yards from the bombastic new home of Germany’s BND foreign intelligence agency.

Poitras and Vegezzi hope to take the exhibition to

New York in the fall.

The exhibition “Circles” by Laura Poitras can be seen at Neuen Berliner Kunstverein from June 18 to Aug. 8.

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LONDON: Thousands of heavy metal fans were camping, singing — and even moshing — on Saturday at Britain’s first full music festival since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

The three-day Download Festival, taking place at Donington Park in central England, is one of a series of test events to see whether mass gatherings can resume without triggering outbreaks of COVID-19.

About 10,000 fans, a tenth of the festival’s pre-pandemic attendance, secured tickets to watch more than 40 UK-based bands including Frank Carter & The Rattlesnakes, Enter Shikari and Bullet for My Valentine.

Attendees all took COVID-19 tests before the event, and don’t have to wear masks or follow social distancing rules during the festival.

Promoter Andy Copping said there was a “real sense of euphoria” at the event, which runs through Sunday, despite the wet weather lashing much of the UK after several weeks of warm sunshine.

“It wouldn’t be Download unless there was a bit of rain,” he said.

Concertgoer Alexander Milas said rain and mud would not mar the event.

“In a way it makes it better,” he said. “It is amazing how that brings people together. The sheer misery and joy of being around a lot of like-minded, really wonderful people. I feel like it is perfect because it’s like ‘Weather be damned, we are going to have a great time.’”

Britain has recorded almost128,000 coronavirus deaths, the highest toll in Europe. The government has delayed the lifting of remaining social and economic restrictions for four weeks from the planned June 21 date amid a rise in cases driven by the highly contagious delta variant first identified in India.

Health officials are aiming to give everyone 18 and over in the UK a first dose of vaccine by July 19, and to have everyone over 50 fully vaccinated with both doses.