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Dive into a secret, third-world shadow industry of online content moderation. Here we meet five “digital scavengers,” a handful of thousands of people outsourced from Silicon Valley whose job is to delete “inappropriate” content off of the internet. In a parallel struggle, we meet people around the globe whose lives are dramatically affected by online censorship. A typical “cleaner” must observe and rate thousands of intense images every day, from war zone photography to pornography, leading to lasting psychological impacts. Yet underneath their work lies profound questions around what makes an image art or propaganda and what defines journalism.
The Cleaners reveals the bitter reality that social media is as much a tool for expression as it is a platform for radicalized social and political opinions, the impacts of which are still unknown. Debut directors Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck unpack an urgent conversation surrounding Silicon Valley’s control over our perception of free speech that we must all grapple with as it threatens to unravel the fabric of our society: both online and IRL.
Fri. 1/19, 5:30 p.m., Egyptian, PCYEAR 2018
CATEGORY World Doc
COUNTRY Germany/Brazil
RUN TIME 88 min
LANGUAGE English and Tagalog
SUBTITLES Yes with English subtitles
COMPANY Gebrueder Beetz Filmproduktion
WEBSITE www.gebrueder-beetz.de
EMAIL n.hoelzl@gebrueder-beetz.de
PHONE +49 3069566914
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Hans Block is a German theatre director, musician, and filmmaker. He studied music at the Berlin University of the Arts and directing at the Ernst Busch Institute for Theatre Directing, also in Berlin. Moritz Riesewieck is a German theatre director, author, and filmmaker. He studied economics as a scholar of the German National Academic Foundation, followed by directing at the Ernst Busch Institute for Theatre Directing in Berlin. Moritz Riesewieck and Hans Block have been working as a team since 2007 under the label Laokoon, creating theatre performances and cross-media work. The legend of Laokoon—who revealed the danger of the Trojan horse—serves as an example of their work. The Cleaners marks their debut documentary movie.