Total Trust: a compelling study of state surveillance

• Reviewed from CPH:DOX Festival 2023. 

George Orwell’s all-seeing super-state looks closer than ever in this expose of China’s state-of-the-art surveillance regime, directed by Zhang Jialing, the co-director of 2019’s Sundance winner One Child Nation. Spectacular shots of Beijing’s futuristic neon skyline, all choreographed fireworks and Blade Runner-scale video-billboard architecture, establish the country’s hi-tech might: this isn’t your 20th-century security state, even if it still fosters the traditional cult of patriarch-leader. (“Look, President Xi is waving to us,” two commuters marvel at a mural on a passing train. “We are so honoured, he is watching over us.”)

The state in turn claims, in public info films about its Sharp Eyes neighbourhood watch programme and smart-networked citizen loyalty/reward database, to dream of nothing more sinister than tidily parked bicycles and closed windows on parked cars (a neighbour will come set you right). And at a smart-cities trade fair, firms sell facial recognition tech for “stressed employee detection”. But we all know where such power tends, and the Chinese Communist Party is not an institution that accepts its own fallibility. In its social credit ledger – which affects your financial credit and your children’s school options – the credits are far outweighed by the potential violations, from public “extravagance” to “petitioning a higher authority”. In China, trust only flows upwards.

Pre-teen Tutu already knows his government sees petitioners as an “obstacle”. His lawyer father, Chang Weiping, was arrested in 2020 for “violations of security” – representing dispossessed homeowners – and has not been seen since. Tutu and his mother, Chen Zijuan, are now sacrificing their own social credit to campaign for his release. In one agonising sequence, they drive overnight, phones off, to attend his hearing; roadside police still detain them until it’s over. 

In another searing scene, Zhang’s other protagonists, previously disappeared lawyer Wang Quanzhang and his family, are physically besieged in their flat on Human Rights Day, masked strangers blocking Wang from his invitations to speak at foreign embassies. The pressure is also moral: neighbours heckle Zijuan as “a disgrace to the Chinese people”; she finds Weiping’s parents too cowed to fight for their son, aware their neighbours are watching, while young Tutu has swung to the other extreme, wildly assailing CCTV cameras aimed at them.

Zhang finds other notes of defiance and seeds of rebellion, especially among the young. Her chilling, damning film, directed from outside China (Zhang also has a police record for making One Child Nation) with the help of dozens of anonymous local collaborators, stands as another piece of the resistance: a compelling warning of unchecked surveillance, holding an incriminating mirror to our would-be watchers.

► Follow the Total Trust website for details of upcoming screenings.