The Critical Room: Total Trust - China in a technological iron grip

The surveillance society in China has reached new, brutal heights. In the documentary TOTAL TRUST (2023), we are presented with some of the heartbreaking destinies in a country approaching George Orwell's darkest predictions.

The screening will be followed by a discussion about China's iron grip on its population, and not least the regime's political opponents. What happens to a society where privacy barely exists, and do we see similar tendencies in the West?

The panel:

• Lars Gjesvik is a senior researcher in the Security and Defence Research Group at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), where he is also co-leader of the Research Centre for Digitalisation and Cyber Security.

• Gerald Folkvord is a political advisor at Amnesty International in Norway and an expert on human rights.

• Yunyun Zhou is Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo

• Moderator - Jon Sæter

Practical information

• The film is screened at Cinemateket in Tancred at 18.00 on Thursday NOV. 16. 

• The conversation will take place before the screening and will be held in English.

About the film

One Child Nation director Jialing Zhang, an exile from her homeland, has once again made a gripping and shocking documentary from China, using anonymised cinematographers. This time she focuses on the fate of three human rights activists who have variously ended up in prison as a result of the authorities' increasingly violent surveillance of their own citizens. As surveillance cameras continue to pop up and the authorities tighten their grip on their citizens by collecting vast amounts of personal data, relationships between neighbors, family members and friends are also changing. What is masqueraded as technological advances and a more easygoing society is beginning to destroy the citizens' safety and privacy.

The Critical Room

The screening is part of the section The Critical Room (DKR) which is Films from the Souths forum for debate and conversation.