Hippies from the Thy Camp.
The North Sea July 1970.
In fact it is epoch-making: Facebookistan is the first critical documentary film about Facebook – not just in Denmark, but surprisingly enough throughout the whole world. We all communicate with each other on Facebook everyday, but this gigantic global and hermetically sealed company has almost completely avoided critical supervision, even though it must be one of the most powerful companies in the world.
For the last couple of years, the man behind Facebookistan, film director Jakob Gottschau, has been compiling stories about Facebook – both about the company’s, at times, absurd censorship policy and its endeavours to collect every sliver of information about you and me only to convert it into billions of advertising dollars.
Among other things, after a great deal of trouble, Gottschau managed to track down one of the censors, a Philippine woman, whose practically unpaid job is to the administrate Facebook censoring. In the film we also meet some of the future freedom fighters who are fighting against both surveillance and censorship on the part of the Facebook site. Because the fact is, that censorship does not just affect nudity, but also oppressed groups in such countries as Turkey.
In my own case, where first Apple and then Facebook censored forty-year old documentary photographs from my Hippie books, has also been included in the film. Both the book covers and the pictures are still forbidden, but the case came up for discussion in the European Parliament and in Brussels became known as The Danish Case. (And in fact helped convince me that the EU can perhaps play a positive role relative to the limiting the worst dirty tricks of multinational companies, which we Danes in this tiny country of ours would not otherwise have been able to influence).
I have written a foreword for use in the abbreviated English language version of, “The Danish Case”, where I talk about the whole history of censorship – and in relation to the film I have published both the Danish and English text on the book’s page.
This is the trailer to Jakob Gottschau’s film, which at the moment is being sold for broadcasting on TV stations all around the world:
The movie’s homepage: Facebookistan.org