We Live in Public

Ondi Timoner's 2009 documentary follows the internet entrepreneur Josh Harris across more than a decade of filming. In 1999, Harris housed a hundred and fifty volunteers in a fully wired underground bunker for a project called Quiet and broadcast their every movement online; afterwards he and his girlfriend did the same in their own home, streaming their meals, their arguments and their private life. Both experiments fell apart. The film's weight today comes from its foresight: what was done in 1999 was an early and extreme rehearsal of an arrangement that social media would make voluntary and ordinary a decade later. Timoner shot the archive herself, so the documentary is direct record rather than reconstruction. It won the grand jury prize for documentary at Sundance, making Timoner the first director to take that prize twice. Who it's for: viewers interested in internet history, the argument over privacy and documentaries about surveillance. Who it's not for: anyone avoiding content about deteriorating mental health and psychological abuse, or wanting a clearer position on the ethics of the experiment.