Black Code

[projekktor id=’27683′]

Black Code is a documentary directed by Toronto’s acclaimed documentarian Nicholas de Pencier (Four Wings and a Prayer, Watermark).

Black Code is a gripping account of how governments control and manipulate the internet in order to censor and monitor their citizens. With stories from exiled Tibetan monks circumventing China’s surveillance apparatus, Syrian citizens tortured for Facebook posts, Brazilian activists using social media to distribute alternative news, and Pakistani online violence against women, we see firsthand the high-stakes consequences that our unprecedented level of digital communication can produce. As this battle for control of cyberspace is waged, our ideas of citizenship, privacy, and democracy will be challenged to the very core.

Adapted from the eponymous 2013 book by Prof. Ron Deibert, Black Code premiered at TIFF last year. The film was nominated for Best Editing in a Feature-length Documentary at the Canadian Screen Awards last month. “Our unprecedented electronic connectivity has created an enormous and rapidly evolving new paradigm. Every day in the news there are stories relating to privacy, censorship, and surveillance online. How to choose one path through this labyrinth of possibilities that could form a coherent through line in a linear documentary film? Our collective hope is that by collecting these stories together, we can help people become more conscious of their own implications and vulnerabilities as we all live more and more of our lives online,” de Pencier says in a release.

Black Code is rated 14A.