Down With... Privacy


You are being watched all the time.


CCTV cameras track you on the street, in your car and on public transport. Your internet provider records every web page you have ever visited and Search Engines track everything you have ever searched for. Your smartphone knows exactly where you have been and how much time you spent there. 



They are watching you. They know what toothpaste you like, and how often you order pizza. They know who your friends are, and what television shows you watch. 

They probably know more about your sexual predilections than you do, and they certainly know about those pills you're taking and those videos you bootlegged and those payments you neglected to mention to your accountant.

You might hope they never find out about that other thing (you know the one I'm talking about) but they probably already know about that too.


Privacy is a big deal at the moment. 

People value their privacy; they are obsessed with it. For many people, it's the most important commodity in their lives.

I know this because people post Twitter messages about Privacy. They write about it on Facebook and they film themselves fighting for it. They explain to all their followers that the messages they post on Instagram and Tik Tok about what they are eating for lunch or where they are buying their groceries are private. All those updates about the films they are watching and who they are dating and exactly how they feel about various politicians, celebrity chefs, charity organisations and adorable kittens... those are private, intimate details of their personal lives, not to be viewed by anyone. Ever. (Don't forget to click here to like and subscribe!)


Privacy is at the heart of our (sort of) final film in the "Cancel Culture" series; but we're not talking about Google keeping a log of your internet searches or Fitbit remembering every time your heartrate went up.



The Lives of Others takes place in East Germany in the 1980s, when everyday life was monitored and enforced by the Stasi - a ruthless network of security police who had carte blanche to invade every aspect of everyone's lives on the slightest whim.

Laura Mulvey famously said that cinema is inherently voyeuristic; that we (the audience) derive "visual pleasure" from watching characters going about their private lives for our personal enjoyment. To back up her thesis she cites Hitchcock rather a lot, which is hardly surprising since his films often explicitly deal with the idea of voyeurism.


Like Hitchcock, The Lives of Others spends a lot of time exploring the "Observer" and the "Observed" but it also concerns itself with a society that is built around "total" paranoia; a society that views every single citizen as the enemy. 

But The Lives of Others does something else as well. It shows what can happen when someone else's life becomes a private narrative for an unseen spectator. When all of the insignificant little details of our day to day lives become plot twists for an audience that may or may not be invested in finding out how the story is going to "resolve".

People today may fret about "surveillance culture" but there were times and places when private information was used for much more than tracking consumer habits and measuring which television shows to cancel. 

There were (and still are) societies where nothing was private. And everything was an insurrection.


We will screen The Lives of Others at 7.30 on Thursday, the 1st of June at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.




Please note that The Lives of Others is in German, with English Subtitles.

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