Three years ago, Yana Peel abruptly resigned as director of the Serpentine Galleries in London after reports connected hervis--vis her husbands private equity firmto NSO Group, a controversial Israeli cybersecurity company known for its flagship spyware that allows users to hack unsuspecting cell phones. Those who have raised alarm about the group describe it as analogous to gun manufacturers prior to U.S. firearm regulations: a weapons merchant operating indiscriminately within a legal system ill-equipped to control it.

Peels relationship to the company, it turned out, was tenuous. (She owns an indirect and passive interest in Novalpina, the investment fund that acquired the NSO Group in 2019, but has had no involvement with the Israeli company.) The Guardianone of the first publications to report on the directors alleged involvementissued a rare retraction saying as much.

And yet Peels resignation from the Serpentine represented an important milestone in the 11-year history of the Israeli company, according to Eyal Weizman, founding director of the investigative art collective Forensic Architecture: it marked the first moment of accountability to any actions related to the NSO Group.

If Weizman and his group have their way, this instance of accountability likely wont be the last. This month, Forensic Architecture unveiled its newest project: an interactive platform that charts thousands of instances of so-called digital violence tied to the NSO Groupas well as the events, private interests, and other forces that have empowered the company along the way.

Its part art, part legal resourceone that, like other Forensic Architecture projects, may well be employed as evidence in a courtroom one day. The Turner Prize-nominated research lab has previously trained its eyes on subjects ranging from Russian military activity in Ukraine and U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan. The new project is the most comprehensive database ever assembled dedicated to whats been called the worlds most notorious surveillance company.

Rounding out the artsier features of Digital Violence, as the platform is titled, are video investigations narrated by Edward Snowden; interviews with activists, journalists, and lawyers worldwide who have been the subject of targeted hacks; and a sound piece composed by Brian Eno. Laura Poitras, the Academy Award-winning director of Citizenfour,the documentary about Snowden, has also made a short film about the project, which is set to debut at Cannes Film Festival this month.

Courtesy of Forensic Architecture.

A missed call or a strange text: these are perhaps the only signs that your phone has been infected by Pegasus, the name of the NSO Groups signature software, according to Forensic Architectures lead researcher Shourideh Molavi. After that, the users on the other end have access to virtually everything on your deviceyour calls and texts; your passwords and GPS information; your network of friends, family, and colleagues. They can even tap into your camera and microphone, enabling real-time surveillance. This is what Forensic Architectures members have dubbed digital violence.

Were used to examining missiles, tanks, bullets, Molavi told Artnet News. Now, were dealing with a kind of state violence that you cannot see, that is difficult to detectthat doesnt require any agency from the user, and thats privately funded and sold by a private company. All of these things make for a dangerous package of human rights violations.

Often, physical violence isnt far away. What Forensic Architectures platform makes clear is that instances of Pegasus-related digital violence are often accompanied by real-world attacks, be it in the form of break-ins, lawsuits, or arrests. In interviews, hacking victims recall the psychological and emotional toll of being infected: they become anxious, have trouble sleeping, and feel like theyre constantly being watched.

Its hard for people to understand how a hack can have physical consequences, Molavi said. Its just your phone, right? But really, its your relationships, its your family, its your feeling of security, its your mental health.

Theres another crucial consideration, too: digital violence transcends geopolitical boundaries. Whereas states cant exercise judicial power outside the limits of their respective territories, Pegasus gives its users the power to terrorize almost anyone, anywhere, according to numerous reports on the product.

Despite challenges in court, Israels Ministry of Defense continues to grant the NSO Group export licenses; and the companys corporate structure has allowed it to put its signature product in markets in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and even the United States. NSO has yet to confirm any of its clients, but according to a report from Citizen Lab, Pegasus has been used in at least 45 countries worldwide since 2015.

Representatives from the NSO Group did not immediately respond to Artnet Newss request for comment, but in a statement to the Washington Post, a spokesperson for the company dismissed Forensic Architectures platform.

These are recycled claims, filled with inaccuracies and half-truths, the spokesperson said. The company investigates all credible claims of misuse, and takes appropriate action based on the results of its investigations. This includes shutting down a customers systema step NSO has taken several times in the past, and will not hesitate to take again if a situation warrants.

For Forensic Architecture and its allies, Digital Violence aims to do what international judicial organizations, traditional press outlets, and other authorities wontor cant.

During a recent event to inaugurate the platform at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin, where Forensic Architecture is currently included in an exhibition on open-source investigation, Edward Snowden said: The investigation of not just the NSO group, but this sector and this technology, is the most important unwritten story in media today.

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Art Collective Forensic Architecture Has Teamed Up With Edward Snowden to Investigate a Shadowy Global Spyware Company - artnet News

Investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald sounded off on Thursday about the Biden White House admitting it has joined forces with Big Tech entities like Facebook to censor what it dubs "misinformation."

Greenwald, who notably broke the Edward Snowden-NSA civilian surveillance story, told "Fox News Primetime" that the apparent merger between large private business firms and a powerful federal government is a "classic definition" of economic fascism.

"I have been trying to make the point for well over a year now [that] lot of people think that this censorship is coming from executives of Facebook, Google, and Twitter, which really isn't true," Greenwald said Thursday.

The journalist added that Big Tech appeared cowed by liberal journalists "shaming" them for not censoring enough during the Trump era as the Democrats "increased in power" while Democratic lawmakers kept summoning tech CEOs to Capitol Hill to further "threaten" them if they neglected to censor what the left considers "hate speech" or "misinformation."

"It's really a merger of state and corporate power which is ironically is the classic definition of fascism," said Greenwald.

"We have heard so much about fascism over the last five years. This is what it actually is. And the people who say they are against it are actually now supporting it," he said.

The increased concern over federal government interventionist actions came to a head earlier in the day when White House Press Secretary Jennifer Psaki essentially admitted the Biden administration is enlisting the Big Tech giants to quash speech they don't like or as host Pete Hegseth said, turning Facebook, Google and Twitter into "the de-facto censorship arm of the federal government."

Hegseth noted Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, whose role is the nation's chief medical doctor, spoke at the White House over the apparent epidemic of such "misinformation."

Murthy noted that his office's public advisories are saved for "public health threats" such as the USSG's lung cancer warning long denoted on tobacco packaging but instead warned of the "insidious threat" that "misinformation" poses to public health.

"Misinformation, its always misinformation," Hegseth said. "Its a word that the Biden administration cant get enough of.Its Orwellian double-speak deliberately ambiguous, so they can define italways."

Hegseth noted once again that Psaki, Murthy and Biden can essentially ask Big Tech to label whatever statements or images it wants to be "misinformation" even if the facts therein are true.

He also remarked that "misinformation" has since supplanted "circle-back" as the spokeswoman's buzzword-du-jour.

The host further added that President Trump long derided as a purveyor of "fascist" policies by groups like Antifa, whose name is a portmanteau of "Anti-Fascist" was essentially given a gift in his pending class action litigation against Big Tech.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Trump sued social media companies in Miami federal court earlier this month, claiming he and others to have been wrongfully silenced for their political beliefs.

"The White Houses admission today hammers home the point that President Trump is making in his class-action lawsuit against Facebook that social media companies act as the de-facto censorship arm of the federal government," said Hegseth.

"I hope the Trump team makes this clip Exhibit #5,000 in their lawsuit. They just came out and said it."

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Greenwald: WH and Big Tech 'ironically' creating textbook 'definition of fascism' they claim to be against - Fox News

A controversy over Fox News host Tucker Carlson's texts and emails has revived Republican interest in curtailing the National Security Agency's surveillance program, an issue that has often divided the party between libertarians and national security hawks.

Fifteen House Republicans, led by Reps. Louie Gohmert of Texas and Bill Posey of Florida, sent the NSA a letter on Tuesday, demanding explanations of its surveillance practices and how a U.S. citizen's communications might lawfully be ensnared in its spying on foreign nationals.

Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican who is a longtime critic of the NSA, has also sought an investigation of the incident. "I write to you to demand that you investigate the National Security Agency's (NSA) alleged spying and unmasking of Tucker Carlson, as well as any leaks of his private emails from the NSA to other reporters," he said in a letter.

KAMALA IN CRISIS

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy requested that Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee investigate Carlson's June allegation that the NSA had spied on him in an effort to take his highly rated show off the air.

"The NSA cannot be used as a political instrument, and House Republicans will ensure accountability and transparency," McCarthy, a California Republican, said at the time.

"It's illegal for the NSA to spy on American citizens. It's a crime," Carlson said on his show. "It's not a Third World country. Things like that should not happen in America."

The spy agency has publicly denied Carlson's claims. "This allegation is untrue," an NSA spokesperson said in a statement. "Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency and the NSA has never had any plans to try to take his program off the air."

"We target foreign powers to generate insights on foreign activities that could harm the United States," the statement continued. "With limited exceptions (e.g. an emergency), NSA may not target a US citizen without a court order that explicitly authorizes the targeting."

Republicans were dissatisfied with this response, especially following an Axios report that the NSA surveilled Carlson through incidental collection while attempting to secure an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, raising questions about how the outlet would have obtained this information.

"Asserting that Tucker Carlson is not and never has been an intelligence target of the Agency does not rule out the possibility of his being surveilled or unmasked for supposed ties to a party under investigation," the House Republicans wrote in their letter.

"I am open-minded enough to believe, if given convincing evidence, that the NSA may be telling the truth, but when a long train of abuses conducted by the NSA evinces a consistent design to evade the law and violate the constitutionally-protected liberties of the people, the NSA must do more than tweet a carefully worded denial to be trusted," Paul wrote in his letter.

Surveillance by the NSA, initially revealed in part in 2013 leaks by former agency contractor Edward Snowden while Barack Obama was president and President Joe Biden was vice president, has often become the target of GOP ire under Democratic administrations. But party leaders have been reluctant to shed powers the federal government acquired after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S.

Unmasking and surveillance became an issue again when an associate of former President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign was surveilled, and incoming national security adviser Michael Flynn had the contents of a controversial call with a Russian official leaked. Trump repeatedly alleged that the Obama administration spied on his campaign, while officials defended the initial inquiries as justified.

Flynn was charged with misleading federal investigators about the Russian call. Trump and his campaign were investigated to determine whether they colluded with the Russian government's attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election. Flynn was pardoned at the end of a complicated legal saga, and special counsel Robert Mueller did not establish a Trump-Russia election conspiracy.

As the top Republican on the House Intelligence panel, Rep. Devin Nunes of California repeatedly pressed officials on the surveillance and unmasking of Trump associates during the Obama era.

Former Rep. Justin Amash, a Michigan Republican turned Libertarian Party member who led a bipartisan effort to limit warrantless surveillance and data collection, argued that these investigations did not go far enough compared to his proposed legislative remedies.

"The NSA is doing all the things that McCarthy and Nunes voted for it to do," Amash tweeted after Republican leaders spoke out on the Carlson allegations. "When I tried to stop the FISA 702 reauthorization, they said I was endangering American lives. GOP leaders urged Trump to denounce my efforts and sign the FISA bill, which he did. Now they feign outrage."

Amash made a similar observation in 2019 when a federal surveillance court rebuked the FBI for violating Americans' privacy rights through its foreign intelligence programs. "This is FISA 702," he tweeted at the time. "In 2018, I led the charge against the establishment to stop this program. President Trump attacked my efforts and signed it into law, with the support of [former House Speaker Paul] Ryan, [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi, McCarthy, Nunes, and [Rep. Adam] Schiff. It's an outrageous violation of our Constitution and our rights."

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE IN THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER

"The Tucker thing will get the base's juices flowing, but we haven't been consistent on this," said a veteran Republican operative in Washington, D.C.

"It is imperative that any claim of a U.S. government agency illegally spying on a private citizen be taken seriously," Gohmert, Posey, and over a dozen other House Republicans wrote, requesting an NSA response by Aug. 1. "Therefore, in addition to your response to these important questions, we are urging you to provide all documents related to your agency involving Tucker Carlson to us."

Original Location: Tucker Carlson reignites NSA surveillance debate on the Right

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Tucker Carlson reignites NSA surveillance debate on the Right - Denver Gazette

CANNES, France -- Thirty years after JFK, Oliver Stone has returned to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, this time in a documentary.

JFK Revisited: Through the Looking Glass" is a kind of non-fiction addendum to one of Stone's most sensational and controversial films. The documentary, which is to premiere Monday at the Cannes Film Festival, is likely to prompt another round of debate on both the American tragedy and Stone's methods. But for the 74-year-old filmmaker, it was a way to answer his critics and go deeper into a history he's forever linked with.

I was a relative novice when that film came out. I was nave. I didnt know that Id get banged like this and it was hard, Stone said in an interview. It became as if I was untrustworthy. In Hollywood, I became labeled a conspiracy theorist which I think is a term from a 1952 CIA document an attempt to discredit people. But people liked the movie. As a movie-movie, it worked.

JFK was nominated for eight Oscars, including best picture, and won two. It grossed more than $200 million. But it was also surrounded by questions about its factuality. JFK Revisited" has doubts attached to it, too. Several streaming services passed on distributing the film in part over their fact checks. In Cannes, the film has set up international releases in several countries and is seeking a U.S. distributor.

The documentary, which has been edited down to around two hours after being twice that, makes no declarations about who killed Kennedy. It pulls in part from millions of government files that have been released in the years since JFK. In 2017, President Donald Trump delayed the release of more documents, citing national security.

JFK Revisited delves deeply into inconsistencies in Kennedy's autopsy, the handling of key pieces of evidence and Lee Harvey Oswald's alleged ties to the CIA. And its deepest suspicions not unlike JFK lie in the U.S. intelligence services.

I feel the most important is why President Kennedy was killed, said Stone. "We answered with our evidence that he was going to withdraw from Vietnam. The dtente with Cuba was in motion. The nuclear test ban treaty had been signed. He was looking for a dtente with Russia. He was an anti-colonialist."

Stone, whose films include "Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, himself fought in Vietnam.

I went in as a hawk. I believed we were doing the right thing, he said. Even when I came out of Vietnam, I was not an activist. It takes years to reeducate yourself. And I found out more and more. By the time I made ("JFK"), I didnt know what I know now. The history of this country is screwed up. We havent told it."

In films like Wall Street," Nixon and W., Stone has charted through his own provocative lens much of the last 50 years of American history in movies that gave politically charged figures splashy big-screen portraits. But his relationship with both Hollywood and Washington has declined in more recent years. His last fiction film was 2016's Snowden," a biopic that depicted Edward Snowden as an American hero. It was painstaking to get funded and little noticed on release.

"It kind of broke my spirit," said Stone.

His skepticism for American democracy has only increased. A plutocracy is more accurate, he said, citing the influence of money in elections. Democracy is a strange word. It's in question.

At the same time, Stone has been drawn to meeting and documenting some of the world's dictators and strongmen. Stone interviewed Russia's Vladimir Putin at length for a Showtime series that was criticized as fawning. He has done interviews with Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Stone is currently prepping a series with the former Kazakhstan leader Nursultan Nazarbayev.

What attracted to me those figures was they are balancing America. American cannot be the sole power in the world. I think Henry Kissinger would agree with me. I think Machiavelli would agree with me," said Stone. Balance of power is the only way this world can be free of one control, one tyrant. Thats the real tyrant. America.

I'm not a bad guy, Stone added. And I don't love dictators.

As for Stone's relationship to Hollywood, he said he tries not to think about too much. I just try to keep going, Stone said. In Cannes, he also screened a director's cut of JFK. But when he considers the kinds of movies that get made today in the U.S., he sees little political inquiry or international perspective.

I find that many American filmmakers would be very good but they deal with crime issues its on TV all the time. Theyre great at violence. Except for a few filmmakers, they never go against American foreign policy, which is wrong. Thats wrong.

America is censoring itself. Its censoring Facebook, its censoring the ex-president. Were scared. Were scared of hearing the truth, Stone continued. Sometimes you have to hear the Alex Joneses of the world. You have to have different points of view.

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

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Oliver Stone revisits JFK assassination in new documentary - ABC News

Nearly half of the worlds population owns a smartphone. For those living in conflict zones or suffering human rights violations, these devices are crucial. They help ordinary people record and share the atrocities they witness alerting the world to their plight, and holding to account those responsible for crimes against humanity.

Yet when they come to post this vital digital evidence on social media platforms, citizens often find their posts censored and permanently removed. Companies such as Facebook have no obligation to preserve the evidence, and have been accused of rushing to moderate content on an ad hoc, sometimes incoherent basis.

Given that Human Rights Watch has called atrocities the new normal in the modern world, we must urgently set about creating a system through which citizens across the globe can preserve, share and publish digital evidence of atrocities without the fear of retribution or censorship.

Recent history has shown that social media companies cannot be trusted to preserve vital digital evidence of atrocities. Take the perplexing role of Facebook in Myanmar as an example. Facebook recently banned accounts related to Myanmars military in response to the February 2021 coup.

Read more: Myanmar coup: how the military has held onto power for 60 years

But in 2017, during the genocide of Rohingya Muslims by the same military, Facebook took little action against military-linked accounts. Instead, the platform was accused of whipping up hate in the country, while deleting the posts of Rohingya activists, presumably deeming their evidence of atrocities to have been shared for sadistic pleasure or to celebrate or glorify violence. Facebook has admitted it was too slow to act in Myanmar, but that better technology and more content reviewers are now in place to prevent the spread of hate in the country.

This subjective censorship is not unique to Myanmar. In the recent conflict between Gaza and Israel, Facebook silenced dissident views, blocking editors accounts at the Gaza-based Shehab News agency. YouTube has also been accused of routinely removing evidence of atrocities during the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war. That content is mistakenly flagged by algorithms as violating YouTubes guidelines, something the platforms parent company Google accepts doesnt always get it right but takes incredibly seriously.

To address this problem, the United Nations Human Rights Council has in recent years established a mechanism to collect, consolidate, preserve and analyse evidence related to serious international crimes. For Syria its called IIIM and for Myanmar its the IIMM.

These situation-specific mechanisms have adopted the approach of traditional news outlets, where experienced investigators strategically select individuals and their evidence. Material is selected based on its ability to be used as evidence in court proceedings in the future, where perpetrators of atrocities may be held to account.

Elsewhere, global citizen journalism organisations such as Bellingcat have taken a different approach. They collect evidence from different social media platforms and use a network of volunteers to analyse and investigate it. It was Bellingcat, for instance, behind the unmasking of the Russian man accused of poisoning Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the UK city of Salisbury in 2018.

Laudable as they are, these approaches have their flaws. One of them is that theyre centralised. This increases the risk that citizens identities could be exposed (via a hack, for instance) which often deters people from coming forward and providing evidence in the first place.

Centralised systems are also susceptible to compromise, subjectivity, discrimination or even destruction. The computer hard drive containing evidence from the whistleblower Edward Snowden was destroyed by the Guardian, under the supervision of officials from the UK intelligence agency GCHQ, in 2013. More recently, Israels armed forces bombed the offices of Associated Press and Al Jazeera in Gaza in May 2021, destroying any evidence the news agencies may have been storing.

Its clear we need a decentralised platform, without gatekeepers or potential single points of failure, to properly preserve peoples digital evidence of atrocities. This could be seen as similar to Wikipedia: distributed and under no ones direct control.

However, unlike Wikipedia, such a platform must be able to guarantee anonymity to protect citizens from exposure and future retribution. Once evidence is uploaded, it needs to be time-stamped and made immutable, so that no one (including the evidence provider) can edit or delete the evidence. The platform itself also needs to be resistant to any form of cyberattack, so that it cant be taken down. All this requires engagement with new technologies.

First, creating a distributed website is relatively easy. Conventional websites use whats called a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP), which keeps the websites files stored on a central server or computer. But there are alternative, peer-to-peer protocols (like IPFS, for instance) which enable a websites files to be stored across many computers. This means no authority can shut it down. Similarly, IPFS can also be used to store evidence-related files in a distributed and decentralised fashion.

Making evidence-sharing anonymous simply requires the website to be integrated with an evidence drop box area supported by Tor, which creates free and open-source software for anonymous communication. News outlets such as the Guardian and the New York Times already use Tor for anonymous file drops. Citizens should also be encouraged to use Tors anonymous browser to shield themselves from corporate tracking and government surveillance.

Finally, unlike centralised systems, the evidence uploaded anonymously to this distributed file system (IPFS) must remain immutable and indestructible. This can be achieved by engaging with the blockchain network, which is the technology behind cryptocurrencies.

Blockchain is an open-source distributed ledger or database system in which an updated copy of the records is available to all stakeholders at all times across the globe. This makes it almost impossible for a single person or company to hack everybodys ledger, ensuring security against cyberattacks. The database stores cryptocurrency transaction data but blockchain could also store digital evidence.

The evidence-drop website we propose means victims and witnesses can upload their evidence during a crisis and, when situation is favourable, see it used by investigative journalists or by prosecutors at the International Court of Justice.

Such a website would empower ordinary citizens and whistleblowers to fight injustice and atrocities. At the same time, it would put psychological pressure on perpetrators, whod know evidence exists of their crimes which cannot be destroyed, altered or invalidated. This shift of power and mindset could reconfigure the relationship between oppressor and oppressed, overturning the new normal of atrocities that appears to have taken hold across the world.

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Facebook often removes evidence of atrocities in countries like Syria and Myanmar but we can preserve it - The Conversation UK

Privacy and security-focused Linux distribution Tails, The Amnesic Incognito Live System, has announced a major new release completely overhauling how it connects users to the Tor network.

"After connecting to a local network, a Tor Connection assistant helps you connect to the Tor network," the project maintainers explained in the release notes for the latest version, Tails 4.20.

"This new assistant is most useful for users who are at high risk of physical surveillance, under heavy network censorship, or on a poor Internet connection."

The team claimed its freshly developed wizard, which launches with the option of "easier" automatic connection or "safer" hidden connectivity, offers better protection to users who may need to hide their activity from network operations, makes it easier to connect to Tor bridges, assists with troubleshooting network connectivity issues, and walks first-time users through getting Wi-Fi up and running.

It's far from finished, though. The team is working on a laundry list of improvements, including the option to save Tor bridge details to persistent storage, automatically detect when a Wi-Fi network is not working, and the ability to detect and handle captive-portal login requirements common to commercial Wi-Fi hotspots.

First released in June 2009 as a successor to the Incognito project but not hitting a stable 1.0 milestone until five years later, Tails aims to preserve users' privacy by routing all traffic through the Tor network a volunteer-driven encrypted overlay network itself launched back in 2002.

Given a publicity boost by whistleblower Edward Snowden, Tails has proven popular even if simply downloading it can get you on the NSA's naughty list. Development on the project has never ceased, from fixing security issues to improving memory privacy, the user interface, adding support for booting from USB sticks, and most recently boosting performance.

As well as the new connection wizard, Tails 4.20 includes the ability to host a website accessible only on the Tor network as an "onion service," an updated browser and email client, the latest Tor client, and a shift to Linux 5.10.46 to broaden support for running on newer hardware.

The release also includes a range of bug fixes, though comes with a warning: users looking to upgrade from a Tails 4.14 or earlier installation will need to upgrade manually, or if they've already hit a bug which breaks the update system for automatic upgrading should follow instructions on the release page to manually fix things again.

The new release is available on the Tails site now.

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Happy 4.20: Latest version of Tails bakes connection wizard into pro-privacy Linux distro - The Register

It was perhaps inevitable that someone would organize an international grab bag of auteurs reflecting on the worlds COVID-19 crisis in 2020. While there have already been documentaries like Wuhan Wuhan collecting human interest stories about coronavirus in a very specific place, The Year of the Everlasting Storm chooses a global approach. Its bow in Cannes in the Special Screenings sidebar is amply justified by two whimsical exercises in art house cinema directed by Jafar Panahi and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The other tales are quirky but mixed in impact.

Panahi opens the parade in person with his personal domestic lockdown story, in which a giant pet iguana called Iggy features prominently. Shot in the directors luminous apartment in Tehran, where he spent many years of house arrest pre-COVID courtesy of the Iranian authorities, the 19-minute tale centers around his familys emotional reactions to being separated from each other. With typical humor, Panahi describes how his aging mother turns up at their door dressed head to foot in PPE. After his wife sprays her outerwear with disinfectant, granny talks to her distant granddaughter on a video call that turns very sentimental, with both sides insisting Ill die for you. Grannys mistrust of toothless old Iggy turns to something like sympathy by the films close.

The Bottom LineA mixed bag of coronavirus tales.

Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Special Screenings)Cast: Dongyu Zhou, Yu Zhang, Catherine Machovsky, Bobby Yay Yay JonesDirectors: Jafar Panahi, Anthony Chen, Malik Vitthal, Laura Poitras, Dominga Sotomayor, David Lowery, Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Three episodes come from the American directors David Lowery, Laura Poitras and Malik Vitthal. Vitthals brief take on a Black fathers overwhelming love for his three kids, all of whom have been placed in foster homes, is worth repeat viewing, even if its connection to the pandemic seems marginal. In eight edgy, machine-gun-fire minutes, Bobby Yay Yay Jones educates his son about how to act if he hears gunshots outside (you lie down) and mentions in passing how he himself was a homeless, neglected child and has had to deal with PTSD while fighting for seven years to regain custody of his kids. The synthesized music track plays off against simple animation around the live images, adding surprise to the emotional expressiveness of this striking work.

Poitras, who produced and directed the politically engaged docs Citizenfour, about whistle blower Edward Snowden, and Risk, featuring WikiLeaks Julian Assange, here directs a futuristic, multi-screen mini-documentary that is more nerve-wracking than any horror film. It highlights the threat that coronavirus tracing apps can be used to increase government and police surveillance of citizens without their knowledge. The film proceeds via interviews with those in the know to discuss digital infection of our phones, computers and cameras by malware. The Israeli company NSO Group (which denied the films allegations) is singled out as a bad actor prone to intimidate and sue anyone calling them out. NSO is both a cyber weapons manufacturer and, guess what, the producer of coronavirus tracing apps. Brian Enos music adds to the films dystopian atmosphere, along with a rolling database that scrolls sinisterly over the screen. Its enough to ruin anyones day, which is probably what Poitras intended.

David Lowery returns to the moody atmosphere of his indie Western crime drama Aint Them Bodies Saints in a puzzling tale about a Texas woman (Catherine Machovsky), who once was called Clyde. She sets out to dig up the body of her little brother on the basis of old letters from her father (now also dead). Many years earlier her father stole his sons dead body from a hospital and, unable to get the putrefying corpse to Texas, buried him in the remote countryside. One imagines the boy might have died from some kind of contagion to connect to the films theme, but that has no importance in this weird and partially incomprehensible Gothic horror tale in which skeletons talk.

Singapore director Anthony Chen (Ilo Ilo) offers an excellent take on the stress a young family goes through sharing close quarters during 45 days of lockdown. Though set in China with Chinese actors, the situation is universally recognizable. The break-down in the marriage of a couple played by Dongyu Zhou (noteworthy as the female teen lead in Derek Tsangs Better Days) and her husband Yu Zhang (An Elephant Sitting Still) is gradual but steady as they struggle to take care of their young child on a limited income in a small apartment. While she still works for a call center from home, he (a car salesman) hibernates on the couch. Her nerves are frayed; he wants sex and she refuses. It ends in a liberating but possibly no-return outburst of wildness. Chen offers the viewer some relief from the claustrophobia with outdoor shots of deserted streets and a huge banner that says Wuhan.

Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor, who became the first woman to win Locarnos Golden Leopard with her 2018 feature Too Late to Die Young, looks at the separation of loved ones under COVID restrictions. A plucky mother and her grown daughter keep up a farmhouse, while a city daughter announces her first baby has been born. The family is briefly reunited under a third-floor balcony, where we get a glimpse of new life, a child who will eventually help repopulate the empty pandemic landscape. The use of ancient church music underlines hope in a no-frills story.

Less simple and linear (as might be expected) is Apichatpong Weerasethakuls closing reflection. The set is a naked bed surrounded by neon tube lights, vaguely suggesting a porn film before the action begins. But in the tropical night, the action already has begun: Attracted by the lights, insects of all sizes and shapes congregate indiscriminately over and on the sheets. There is promiscuity, but also death big insects eat smaller ones with unemotional cannibalism. Disembodied human voices float from a scratchy gramophone record off screen, talking over old black and white photographs. Is this life after the apocalypse?

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The Year of the Everlasting Storm: Film Review | Cannes 2021 - Hollywood Reporter