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What does it mean to raise a family or to grow up under constant surveillance? How does it affect a person’s quality of life? What does it do to the potential of an individual, a family, a neighborhood, and a society? Boundaoui, now a journalist, examines the effect of living under constant surveillance in her first documentary, *The Feeling of Being Watched*, which premiers today at the Tribeca Film Festival. (A few months ago, I saw an early cut of the film and was asked to give a critique of any loose legal or narrative threads.) The film weaves the personal and the political, as Boundaoui investigates whether the community she grew up in was indeed under official government surveillance for over a decade. The film doesn’t offer a definitive answer. In it, Boundaoui attempts to uncover the truth by working diligently to convince reluctant community members to speak. But many refuse to answer Boundaoui’s knocks on their doors; they offer her baked goods but no testimony; some even insinuate that she should be more deferential to the FBI. Met with this silence, Boundaoui combs through press clippings and declassified documents. With clues she finds there, she files several FOIA requests with the FBI and the Department of Justice, all of which are denied. Undaunted, she sues the FBI and the DOJ to compel them to release the relevant documents, which the government had conceded <https://www.cjr.org/united_states_project/the-feeling-of-being-watched-assia-boundaoui.php> numbered over 30,000 pages, as a way to object to the burden of what she was requesting. The court rules in her favor. (To date, she has received nearly 5,000 pages of documents and more arrive each month as per court order.) https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/04/21/the-fbis-vulgar-betrayal-of-muslim-americans/ _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
