A New Documentary Looking at Surveillance in an Arab American Community Just Crowdfunded $33,000 on KickStarter
The Feeling of Being Watched just successfully crowdfunded $33,000 on KickStarter and will be the first documentary film to tell the story of the War on Terror from the perspective of an Arab-American neighborhood.
In the 1990's, the small community of Bridgeway outside of Chicago became the focus of one of the largest FBI counter intelligence operations in the United States. No one has gone inside the neighborhood to find out what really happened and what life was like under surveillance, until now. The Feeling of Being Watched focuses on the people that have been directly impacted by FBI operations and how surveillance has personally affected Arab Americans. The documentary includes interviews and personal testimonies addressing how surveillance has personally affected Arab Americans, which has been largely ignored in the mainstream media. The narratives represented in the film show at a micro level what it is like for Arab, Muslim and other communities of color to live under constant surveillance.
I caught up with co-director / producer Assia Boundaoui who is a Bridgeview native to find out more about the film, and how one of the biggest surveillance operations in the 90s impacted her community.
You mention how surveillance began in the 90's for the people in Bridgeview, what sparked your interest to start the documentary 15 years later?
Well, the information about the surveillance beginning in 1993, was something we found out only as we were starting to investigate this story and make the film. The starting point for this film was look, here’s a place where the majority of the neighborhood is really and truly convinced that they are living under government surveillance and have been for a long time. Of course this is something I knew, that neighborhood was the one I grew up in, and I’d grown up with all of this suspicion and paranoia about surveillance, and so I wanted to get to the bottom of it all, what happened in this neighborhood that made everyone feel this way? When did it start? Why? These are the questions my co-director, Alex Bushe and I set out to answer when we began making this film.
Why did you decide to focus on Illinois, in particular the Bridgeview community?
We didn’t decide to make a film about surveillance, and then chose Bridgeview, IL as a case example — rather we decided to focus on a story in Bridgeview, the place where I grew up, which happens to be a story about surveillance and profiling of Arab and Muslim communities. I was born in Algiers, and my parents moved to Chicago when I was just 2. In 1993 my parents moved from the city, to a suburban neighborhood with a mosque and a community of Arab immigrants living around it. Growing up we’d always hear strange whispered stories from our parents about people watching, about listening devices on the phone, about men in suits flashing FBI badges and making rounds in the community. I suppose I really just wanted to make sense of that all — to try to figure out a puzzle about why I grew up the way I grew up as a second-generation Arab/Muslim in America. And how that story is in fact very much a part of the American experience.
With the growing importance of data journalism, were you able to find statistics on US surveillance on Arab / Muslim communities? If so, what did the data show? & Were there any correlations with the data and the interviews you conducted?
Sadly, we actually haven’t been able to find all that much data that gives information about American-Muslim experiences and encounters with surveillance in particular. But there is a local organization in Bridgeview, the Arab American Action Network, that did some informal surveys in the heavily Arab/Muslim south-suburbs of Chicago and came up with some very interesting statistics. For example, one in 10 people in the community has had an encounter with FBI agents, many also reported feeling harassed in their homes and neighborhoods by federal agents. It would be great if we had more of these numbers to try to draw out a story based on the data, but because we don’t the best we can do is rely on anecdotes and try to tell a very localized story about a very common experience among Muslims in this country today.
What was one of the hardest challenges you faced whilst making the documentary and how did you overcome this?
One of the challenges in making a film about surveillance, that focuses a camera lens on people who experienced surveillance — is that the experience of being watched usually makes people very uncomfortable around cameras! So we’ve had to face this obstacle, which is actually about something bigger. Many of us who grew up here were the children of immigrants — my parents and the parents of so many people I grew up with came from countries where there was an active “mukhabarat” and repressive government surveillance and intrusion was normal. The way our parents reacted to this surveillance in their home countries was to duck their heads down, stay quiet about, and perhaps flee to a safer country. So when they found themselves under surveillance again in their adopted country of America, they reacted to it in the same way, they ducked down, they were ashamed about it and they kept quiet. The fact of the matter is that surveillance draws most of its power from secrecy, from the fact that people will be too afraid to speak out against it — and so I firmly believe that the way you take power away from surveillance, is to speak out loud about it, to use our voices to speak over the fear, and tell our stories out loud without shame so that others can hear them and come out of the shadows, and realize that this is a shared story, that many American communities have experienced.
As the co-director and producer what do you hope people will learn from the documentary?
This film at its heart, is a film about ways of seeing, and our hope that we can get people to look at that critically. I hope that people will come away from this film with two things: one that what we see is entirely determined by where we stand (“positionality”), and that how we see each other is fundamentally critical to how we treat each other as human beings. The German philosopher Hegel wrote that, “seeing comes before words,” and in his writing insists on the impossibility of existence without recognition from the other. Surveillance is in its essence a way of seeing without recognizing — it is preconditioned on a great physical distance from the object of its gaze. This film is a visual exploration of the topic in which we confront harmful and sometimes violent ways of seeing, through the lens of a camera — and it’s a challenge to viewers as well as the characters in the film (community and authority alike): to see outside the constructions and presumptions of the other. We hope that through challenging these preconceptions the film will be a catalyst for healing. A healing that is based on mutual recognition and a way of seeing that is reciprocal.
Check out the first 4 episodes of The Feeling of Being Watched mini-series:
