Total Trust

Synopsis

China is in the process of establishing a dictatorship based on Big Data. The film accompanies people who are fighting against an all-controlling surveillance system and in danger of being crushed by it. Thanks to exclusive and intimate access, this long-term observation shows the lives of several activists fighting for human rights, who live under extreme surveillance and traumatisation. At the same time, the film's scope broadens to include ordinary citizens whose daily behaviour is registered and evaluated by an experimental scoring system.

Director Biography

Jialing Zhang is an independent Chinese filmmaker based in Massachusetts, US. She produced In the Same Breath (Sundance Film Festival, 2021), co-directed and produced One Child Nation (Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner, 2019) and Complicit (Human Rights Watch Film Festival, 2017). Most recently, she won a Ridenhour Documentary Film Prize (US) and a Catholic Media Prize (Germany).