“It’s probably just the FBI, go back to sleep,” a bleary-eyed mom reassures her antsy daughter near the beginning of “The Feeling of Being Watched,” responding to some indeterminate hubbub in the quiet suburbia outside. She says it with a weary shrug, as if she were describing hard rain on the roof or a raccoon going through the garbage — for Arab-American filmmaker Assia Boundaoui and her family, the FBI’s presence on their unremarkable, mostly Muslim-populated Chicago street has become an equivalently banal distraction over more than 20 years. But what are the feds looking for, and after years of seemingly fruitless surveillance, how is their continued scrutiny and racial targeting justified? Equal parts angry and anxious, Boundaoui’s smart, unsettling documentary functions both as a real-world conspiracy thriller and a personal reflection on the psychological strain of being made to feel an outsider in one’s own home.
- 5/8/2018
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
Assia Boundaoui’s gripping and frightening documentary “The Feeling of Being Watched” is probably the only movie in recent years to invoke Foucault when talking about FBI counterterrorism surveillance. But it shouldn’t be the last. Having its world premiere at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival, the movie shows what happens to people once they feel they have lost control of their lives.
- 4/30/2018
- by Chris Barsanti
- The Playlist
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