The Cleaners

description

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 off the net. Underneath their work lies profound questions around what makes an image art or propaganda and what defines journalism. 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.

OFFICIAL SELECTION
Sundance 2018
International Film Festival Rotterdam 2018
CPH:DOX 2018
HotDocs 2018
Sheffield Doc/Fest 2018

DIRECTOR'S BIO
Hans Block is a German theatre director, musician, and filmmaker. He studied music at the Berlin University of the Arts and directing at the Ernst Busch Institute for Theatre Directing, also in Berlin. Moritz Riesewieck is a German theatre director, author, and filmmaker. He studied economics as a scholar of the German National Academic Foundation, followed by directing at the Ernst Busch Institute for Theatre Directing in Berlin. Moritz Riesewieck and Hans Block have been working as a team since 2007 under the label Laokoon, creating theatre performances and cross-media work. The legend of Laokoon—who revealed the danger of the Trojan horse—serves as an example of their work. The Cleaners marks their debut documentary movie.