1971

The documentary tells of an action carried out by eight people in Pennsylvania in 1971. They broke into a local federal investigation office, took the files and passed them to the press; their aim was to show that ordinary citizens were being watched unlawfully. It was the period when the movement against the war was at its height, and the documents brought to light the existence of a wide programme of surveillance. The film rests on interviews in which those who carried out the action reveal who they were for the first time and say how they judge what they did years afterwards. The account is built like a heist story, but its real question is about the present: where the legitimacy of a leak begins and where it ends. Johanna Hamilton’s eighty minute American documentary was completed in 2014.