Lester Lawrence Lessig III is an American academic, attorney, and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. Lessig was a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president of the United States in the 2016 U.S. presidential election but withdrew before the primaries.
Woodstock is a 1970 American documentary film of the watershed counterculture Woodstock Festival which took place in August 1969 near Bethel, New York.
The Cinequest Film & Creativity Festival is an annual independent film festival held each March in San Jose, California and Redwood City, California. The international festival combines the cinematic arts with Silicon Valley’s innovation. It is produced by Cinequest, a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) organization that is also responsible for Picture The Possibilities and the distribution label Cinequest Mavericks Studio LLC. Cinequest awards the annual Maverick Spirit Awards. In addition to over 130 world or U.S. premieres from over 30 countries, the festival hosts writer's events including screenwriting competitions, a shorts program, technology and artistic forums and workshops, student programs, and a silent film accompanied on the theatre organ. Founded in 1990 as the Cinequest Film Festival, the festival was rebranded in 2017 as the Cinequest Film & VR Festival and expanded beyond downtown San Jose to Redwood City. It took its present name in 2019.
Aaron Hillel Swartz was an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, and Internet hacktivist. He was involved in the development of the web feed format RSS, the Markdown publishing format, the organization Creative Commons, the website framework web.py, and joined the social news site Reddit six months after its founding. He was given the title of co-founder of Reddit by Y Combinator owner Paul Graham after the formation of Not a Bug, Inc.. Swartz's work also focused on civic awareness and activism. He helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee in 2009 to learn more about effective online activism. In 2010, he became a research fellow at Harvard University's Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption, directed by Lawrence Lessig. He founded the online group Demand Progress, known for its campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act.
Astrid Bussink is a Dutch filmmaker. Her debut film is the documentary The Angelmakers.
Tony Kaye is an English director of films, music videos, advertisements, and documentaries. He is best known as the director of American History X (1998).
Brett Gaylor is a Canadian documentary filmmaker living in Victoria, British Columbia. He grew up on Galiano Island, British Columbia. He was formerly the VP of Mozilla's Webmaker Program. His documentary, Do Not Track, explores privacy and the web economy.
RiP!: A Remix Manifesto is a 2008 open-source documentary film about "the changing concept of copyright" directed by Brett Gaylor.
Petra Costa is a Brazilian filmmaker and actress. She has been a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences since 2018.
The Day We Fight Back was a one-day global protest against mass surveillance by the US National Security Agency (NSA), the UK GCHQ, and the other Five Eyes partners involved in global surveillance. The "digital protest" took place on February 11, 2014 with more than 6,000 participating websites, which primarily took the form of webpage banner-advertisements that read, "Dear Internet, we're sick of complaining about the NSA. We want new laws that curtail online surveillance. Today we fight back." Organizers hoped lawmakers would be made aware "that there's going to be ongoing public pressure until these reforms are instituted."
The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz is a 2014 American biographical documentary film about Aaron Swartz written, directed, and produced by Brian Knappenberger. The film premiered in the US Documentary Competition program category at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2014.
Citizenfour is a 2014 documentary film directed by Laura Poitras, concerning Edward Snowden and the NSA spying scandal. The film had its US premiere on October 10, 2014, at the New York Film Festival and its UK premiere on October 17, 2014, at the BFI London Film Festival. The film features Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, and was co-produced by Poitras, Mathilde Bonnefoy, and Dirk Wilutzky, with Steven Soderbergh and others serving as executive producers. Citizenfour received critical acclaim upon release, and was the recipient of numerous accolades, including Best Documentary Feature at the 87th Academy Awards. This film is the third part to a 9/11 trilogy following My Country, My Country (2006) and The Oath (2010).
Snowden is a 2016 biographical thriller film directed by Oliver Stone and written by Stone and Kieran Fitzgerald. Based on the books The Snowden Files (2014) by Luke Harding and Time of the Octopus (2015) by Anatoly Kucherena, the film stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Edward Snowden, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) subcontractor and whistleblower who copied and leaked highly classified information from the National Security Agency (NSA) beginning in 2013. In addition to Gordon-Levitt, the film features an ensemble cast including Shailene Woodley, Melissa Leo, Zachary Quinto, Tom Wilkinson, Scott Eastwood, Logan Marshall-Green, Timothy Olyphant, Ben Schnetzer, LaKeith Lee Stanfield, Rhys Ifans and Nicolas Cage. An international co-production of Germany, France, and the United States, principal photography began on February 16, 2015 in Munich.
The Hacker Wars is a 2014 documentary film about hacktivism in the United States, directed by Vivien Lesnik Weisman. It was released on October 17, 2014 in the US.
Cullen James Hoback is an American film producer and director. He is also an occasional columnist and speaker. His documentary films include Monster Camp (2007), Terms and Conditions May Apply (2013), and What Lies Upstream (2018), as well as the HBO mini-series Q: Into the Storm (2021). His documentary style has been described as non-fiction horror with a comedic tone. He appears on-camera as a central character in Terms and Conditions May Apply and What Lies Upstream.
Talal Derki is a Syrian Kurdish director, producer and screenwriter. Born in Damascus and of Kurdish descent, Derki studied film directing in Athens at Stavrako High Institute of Cinematographic Art and Television, graduation in 2003. He worked as an assistant director for feature film productions and was a director for different Arab TV programs & TV films between 2009 and 2012. He worked as a freelance cameraman for CNN and Thomson Reuters. He was Oscar nominated in 2019 and became a member of the Academy. He is the winner of the German Film Awards, Lola, in 2019. Talal Derki's short films and feature length documentaries received tens of awards at various festivals. Both of his films Return to Homs and Of Fathers and Sons won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival 2014 and 2018.
The 2016 presidential campaign of Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Harvard University and cofounder of Creative Commons, was formally announced on September 6, 2015, as Lessig confirmed his intentions to run for the Democratic Party's nomination for President of the United States in 2016. Lessig had promised to run if his exploratory committee raised $1 million by Labor Day, which it accomplished one day early. He described his candidacy as a referendum on campaign finance reform and electoral reform legislation.
Dying to do Letterman is a 2011 documentary film, directed by Joke Fincioen and Biagio Messina, and produced under their Joke Productions banner. The documentary follows the journey of Steve Mazan, a stand up comedian with the lifelong dream of performing a comedy routine on the Late Show with David Letterman.
Edward Snowden in popular culture is part of the reactions to global surveillance disclosures made by Edward Snowden. His impact as a public figure has been felt in cinema, advertising, video games, literature, music, statuary, and social media.
iHuman is a documentary about artificial intelligence, social control and power. The film shows how this technology is changing our lives, our society and our future. Such experts as Ilya Sutskever and Jürgen Schmidhuber give interviews about AI and how it is developed and implemented. It also features the leading minds in the field Max Tegmark, Kara Swisher, Michal Kosinski, Stuart Russel, Ben Wizner, Hao Li, Ben Goertzel and Philip Alston. The documentary features its own character representing AI that develops through the film. This character has an abstract VFX form done by Theodor Groeneboom. The constant surveillance through phones, internet, systems in society and through surveillance cameras is discussed as topic crucial for development of AI. The question is posed, if we already are governed by algorithms that are created by big tech corporations, governments and the military industry. It mentions Palantir Technologies and Cambridge Analytica.
