THE CLEANERS - Review By Greg Klymkiw - 2018 Hot Docs Hot Pick: ***** 5-Stars

The gatekeepers of online morality are censors.

The Cleaners (2018)
Dir. Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck

Review By Greg Klymkiw

The scariest word I've heard in quite some time is:

"DELETE"

and it's a word we hear, almost mantra-like in the chilling documentary The Cleaners, a scary portrait of content moderators in the world of social media.

So what, precisely, does a content moderator do? Well, as we discover, they are employees of entities like Facebook, Google, Instagram, Twitter and other social media platforms that have become an almost inextricable part of all our lives. Their job is to scour the internet looking for anything that contravenes company policy, community standards and yes, in many cases, illegal acts (images of child pornography). The offensive material is deleted, and as we experience in the film, it's with a simple keystroke and the utterance of that dreaded word:

DELETE.

Filmmakers Block and Riesewieck focus primarily on a handful of content moderators working in Manila and what we learn early on is that they are not directly employed by any of the aforementioned social media giants, but rather, companies that have been outsourced to provide these services. We're given scant information about how these moderators are actually trained, but what we see and learn is mighty scary.

The moderators are there, in effect, to provide censorship. This would be fine if we were dealing strictly with cut-and-dried materials like child pornography and hate crime/racism, but it goes far beyond this. Nudity, sexuality, acts of violence in war, political satire and/or any personal expression outside of the norm is fair game.

Though the moderators have specific guidelines, this requires them to constantly make judgement calls about what gets deleted and what doesn't. For example, we follow one of the moderators and discover that she is a devout Catholic. Her rabid Christianity is clearly at play in her decisions to "delete".

What's especially impressive about the film is that it employs a fair bit of journalistic balance, but not at the expense of the film's artistry and certainly not at the expense of presenting a point of view that's as progressive as it is scary. What these moderators do is clearly not a good thing. The social media giants are succumbing to all sorts of pressures to restrict/control content - worst of all, from governments that would block the platforms without censorship.

Structurally, the film is cleverly designed to present a myriad of characters and viewpoints. For the most part, the moderators seem like reasonable and intelligent young people, but they are bound both by policy and the fact that they have no choice but to make personal decisions based on their interpretation of said policy. The film also presents the viewpoints of several artists and activists - we see their work, the very valid reasons for its creation and dissemination and then, shockingly, we see moderators discovering the material, applying "policy" to it and then issuing the decree:

DELETE!

We hear about and occasionally see the sort of disturbing and even horrific material these moderators are constantly subjected to and sadly, we learn about how some content moderators are driven to taking their own lives. In countries like the Philippines, we learn that finding a life beyond poverty drives a lot of intelligent young people into the business of content moderation - but for them, the effects can be devastating.

We see American politicians within the context of public hearings as they grill representatives of social media giants about content policies as they relate to child pornography, political interference and terrorism, but clearly the politicians, no matter how well meaning, are completely clueless about social media and the internet in general and the various Google/Twitter/Facebook reps are little more than slick flacks.

What haunts you, long after the film is over are the evocative shots of the moderators themselves as they work. The cameras are trained upon their eyes as they consume endless images on computers screens. If we are looking into the windows of their collective souls, we're looking into hearts and minds of a world mediated by corporate greed, corruption and dedicated to suppression to maintain the highest profit margins possible.

Ultimately, nobody profits - least of all, humanity.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

The Cleaners enjoys it Canadian Premiere at Hot Docs 2018 in Toronto.

Coincidentally, Michael Walker, a brilliant young Canadian artist who posts his beautiful work to hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram had his account removed by the social media giant the very week I saw The Cleaners.

Yes, someone uttered the words DELETE and with a keystroke, this artist's work was removed.

Feel free to protest this affront to free speech. In the case of Mr. Walker's work, this is a clear act of Homophobia, no doubt perpetrated by a "content moderator" applying flawed, personal standards based on corporate policies that are skewed to protecting only profit margins.

Here is Michael's Story:

THE LOOK OF SILENCE - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Powerful, important, deeply moving and utterly chilling companion piece to Joshua Oppenheimer's "The Act of Killing"

The Look of Silence (2014)
Dir. Joshua Oppenheimer

Review By Greg Klymkiw

A sure-fire way to avoid insanity after killing someone is to collect a couple of cupfuls of the victim's blood as it gushes from their jugular, then drink it all down: hot, steaming, sweet, salty and savoury.

If, after repeatedly hacking someone with a machete, and they're still alive, cut off their penis.

If you're interested in merely killing someone and not torturing them, feel free to hack off a woman's breast before she's dead in order to examine what it looks like.

These are a few words of wisdom imparted by men who, with smiles on their faces and infused with great pride, contributed to the wholesale slaughter of over one million innocent people during a foul genocide perpetrated some 50-years-ago.

Yup, you guessed it, Joshua Oppenheimer, the documentarian with the art of filmmaking hardwired into his very DNA is back in town and I steadfastly deliver you this following iron-clad guarantee:

You have not seen, nor will you ever see a movie like The Look of Silence. Never. Ever. Unless, of course, you've seen The Act of Killing, to which this film is a companion piece and one in which I made a similar guarantee when I reviewed that earlier work.

The Look of Silence proves to be an equally brave and cinematically brilliant look at the violent 1965 aftermath to the fall of Sukarno in Indonesia when the country shifted to a military dictatorship. Indonesians who opposed the new government were accused of being communists - a crime punishable by death. In less than a year with aid from the west, most of it from America (naturally), over one million "communists" were murdered.

Yes, many of the victims were communists, but so many others were simply labelled as such to justify killing them. Though the killings were sanctioned by the army, they were, in fact, carried out by civilian militias - squads of bloodthirsty garden variety psychopaths eager to taste blood for the "good" of their country.

THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY
THE ACT OF KILLING
THE LOOK OF SILENCE

The only serious and good dramatic feature film to focus on the beginnings of this tragedy is Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously starring Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hunt in her brilliant Academy Award winning gender bending performance. Not that it's a factual document or anything, but it's a stylish fact-based fictional look at the events leading up to the genocide, placing things in a digestible manner. Given how sickeningly powerful Oppenheimer's documentaries are, the Weir picture isn't at all a bad place to begin before diving headlong into the horrors of both The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence.

Kudos are to be extended to Oppenheimer for creating an equally affecting companion piece that can work just fine as a stand-alone piece, bringing a completely new perspective to the tragedy. His first film on this subject focused the killers. Here, we focus on the victims.

Oppenheimer pulls out all the stops on his filmmaking prowess as an original cinematic storyteller by following Adi, a young 40-something travelling optician whose older brother was butchered during the genocide. Adi's route to offer eye examinations and to sell glasses takes him into the homes of the still-living killers (still feared, all rich and revered by the government as heroes) where he checks their eyesight and probes them about their parts in the genocide. If you want it, metaphor and irony abound in this odd tag-team of eye exams and hardline questioning, but for most, the story and the storytelling here will be the overriding element.

The look of a brother

Oppenheimer bounces between Adi watching interview footage with the various killers in the district (including those men describing gleefully how they murdered Adi's brother) and Adi on the road, confronting the same men he's seen in the videos. In most cases, these confrontations are chilling, the killers dropping unsubtle hints that Adi might be a communist himself and in need of extermination.

His Mother and wife are both terrified for Adi, but also for themselves and Adi's children. Adi's Mother lives everyday with the horror and pain of her son's murder while taking care of her blind, infirm husband whose own memories have been erased by the onset of senility.

The look of a killer

Adi, however, is a man obsessed. He's driven to ask the questions about the brother he never knew. He MUST ask the questions nobody dares to ask. At one point, a killer is so upset with Adi's questions - often relating to morality, culpability and guilt - that the sleaze bucket points out that not even Joshua with his interviewer cap on ever asked such penetrating questions. Oppenheimer, of course, intentionally kept a cool distance in his previous film to allow the killers a chance to "hang" themselves with their bragging, but here, he keeps another form of distance altogether to tell a story - that of Adi's powerful journey to confront the killers of his brother.

This is highly potent and explosive material and once again, Oppenheimer delivers a motion picture that's not only an important document of history, but a magnificent, harrowing and consummate work of art. The fact of the matter is this - most documentary filmmakers are not filmmakers. They're journalists and/or committed activists wanting to present a point of view with respect to information and/or interesting subjects. Oppenheimer transcends those staid notions of documentarians, though. He's a genuine filmmaker, an artist of the highest order. His work is not ephemeral in the least and will survive long, long after he and the rest of us are six feet under.

Though The Look of Silence lives now, it will, most importantly, live forever.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

The Look of Silence begins its theatrical release in Canada at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto via Blue Ice Docs.

1971 - Review By Greg Klymkiw - Brave historic activism against FBI's illegal activities

Justifiable Criminal Action. Target: The FBI

1971 (2014)
Dir. Johanna Hamilton

Review By Greg Klymkiw

1971 by Johanna Hamilton might be one of the most important American documentaries in years, but it's not just the subject matter which demands accolades, but the filmmaking itself is of the highest order.

Long before the brave actions of exiled whistleblower Edward Snowden, a (technically) criminal action was perpetrated upon America's Federal Bureau of Investigation (The FBI). In 1971, a small group of young Philadelphia activists formed "The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI" and carried out a hair-raising break-in upon a sleepy regional FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania. Lifting hundreds upon hundreds of secret FBI files, these brave souls risked everything to discover and expose the insidious illegal actions of the famed domestic criminal intelligence arm of the United States government.

Their actions exposed one of the most heinous breaches of civil rights in a supposedly democratic nation. The Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) was devised and overseen by the seemingly untouchable thug J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI's notorious longtime kingpin, and its goal was to illegally spy upon American citizens to fight against what Hoover believed were un-American activities. Most of the targets were normal, perfectly innocent citizens, including groups of women meeting regularly to discuss women's liberation. Some of the more high profile citizens the FBI spied on included anti-Vietnam movements, the Black Panthers and Martin Luther King.

COINTELPRO included such sleazy, illegal actions as implanting spies amongst these groups and even communities of normal citizens. The plants were to gather information, seed dissent and to even go so far as to implant criminal "evidence" to make persecution/prosecution easier.

CRIMINALS: Richard Nixon & J. Edgar Hoover

Director Hamilton effectively utilizes all the tools of great documentary filmmaking to tell this stunning story, but furthermore, she employs all the best elements of filmmaking period to generate a movie that's as nail-bitingly suspenseful and harrowing as any great fictional political thriller. Call it The Parallax View with real people. Her protagonists in this group include hardened, up-front political activists as well as the astonishingly normal, suburban husband and wife team of Bonnie and John Raines.

Expertly weaving extraordinary archival footage, contemporary interviews with the original members of the Citizens' Committee, plus journalists instrumental in breaking the story, Hamilton manages to generate a film which blows this year's Oscar-winning Snowden documentary Citizenfour off the face of the map with the sheer force of expert filmmaking. 1971 is cinematic art of a very high order. Citizenfour has all the extraordinary Snowden footage, but as filmmaking, its sole importance lies in its subject matter, whereas 1971 - as cinema - transcends its important subject to place itself on a grand perch of sheer movie-making excellence.

Where Hamilton winds us aesthetically is by employing dramatic reenactments that are so brilliantly shot, cut and acted, then expertly blended into the archival and interview footage, that she pulls off the impossible. She out-Eroll-Morisses-Eroll-Moriss and for my money, has generated the best dramatic reenactments I've ever seen in any documentary.

Just a normal American family of heroes/criminals.

Throughout the film we're not only served up with important historical documentation of a turbulent time in American history, but we're plunged into the utter humanity of the Citizens' Committee to a point where we feel a combination of both pride and dread in their ongoing activities. The protagonists and antagonists are as clear as any great thriller, though they are superbly fleshed out with ever-creepy, danger-fraught and insidiously mysterious shades of grey.

This is great filmmaking. It must be seen by everybody.

Now, more than ever, it's especially important for Canadian audiences to see. Canada is on the verge of the most despicable federal legislation in our country's history. As reported in the Jan. 26 edition of Toronto's Globe and Mail, Chancellor Stephen Harper and his ruling Nazi Party of Canada "says his government will introduce promised new national-security legislation…including a provision that draws a line between free expression and endorsing terrorism. [Harper says] he will protect Canadians from homegrown extremists by giving authorities new powers – including the ability to prosecute people for 'the promotion of terrorism.'"

Who will protect Canadians from Harper and his proposed Gestapo?

See 1971. In a vital historical context, it will provide some answers to that question in terms of what might have to happen if Harper follows through with this insane act of terrorism upon our country.

THE FILM CORNER RATING: ***** 5-Stars

1971 is a Blue Ice Docs presentation that's currently playing at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema in Toronto. Demand it be played in YOUR city, town, hamlet, school, community centre and wherever else normal Canadians can get a whiff of what America did to its populace and how we, in this day and age, will be subject to equally immoral, totalitarian and downright criminal activities perpetrated by our own government.