KinoSmith
shopping cart
Your shopping cart is empty!
The Cleaners
Enter a hidden third world shadow industry of digital cleaning, where the Internet rids itself of what it doesn‘t like. Here we meet five “digital scavengers” among thousands of people outsourced from Silicon Valley whose job is to delete “inappropriate” content of the net. In a parallel struggle, we meet people around the globe whose lives are dramatically affected by online censorship. A typical “cleaner” must observe and rate thousands of often deeply disturbing images and videos every day, leading to lasting psychological impacts. Yet underneath their work lie profound questions around what makes an image art or propaganda and what defines journalism. Where exactly is the point of balance for social media to be neither an unlegislated space nor a forum rife with censorship? THE CLEANERS struggles to come to terms with this new and disconcerting paradigm. Evolving from a shared social vision of a global village to a web of fake news and radicalization, the film charts the rise and fall of social media’s utopian ideology.
"A neon-lit documentary shot like a noir thriller" - VARIETY
"The chilling, morally hyper-conscious film "The Cleaners"... introduces us to a handful of these hidden, meagerly paid office workers, cogs in a shadow business headquartered mainly in Manila in unassuming buildings." - Robert Abele, LOS ANGELES TIMES
"With its excellent cinematography, ominous tone and incredibly relevant subject matter, The Cleaners is a masterclass in documentary filmmaking." - FILM PULSE
2018 / Germany / Colour / English / 1.78 widescreen presentation / 5.1 Dolby Surround / 88 minutes
Director: Hans Block & Moritz Rieswieck