Video surveillance is also part of the $1,000 billion investment plan launched by China (Xi Jinping). It is estimated that there will be 1 camera for every 2 inhabitants in China by the end of 2020.
Yet the effectiveness of surveillance devices is often questioned. While the facial recognition system of Anyvision (an Israeli start-up) appears to be more than 99% reliable, lobbies are powerful in this area : nearly 40% of the 1.4 billion euros of European funds intended for security research are allocated to private companies.
The mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, has teamed up with Thales, an arms giant, to make Nice a safe city by developing emotion detection systems in transport and "citizen vigilance" applications. But the 2,000 cameras already present in Nice in 2016 were unable to prevent the July 14 attack.
The challenge of the documentary format: successful educational aesthetics
Designing topics dedicated to technology is sometimes student data complex, the themes being technical and not very visually appealing.
For this documentary, Sylvain Louvet claims to have played with the codes of science fiction films, right down to the music (composed by Mathieu Parnot) which recalls that of SF films from the 80s.
The director has applied himself to varying the narrative modes during the film and mixes 3D animation with slow-motion effects in infrared during the day, with more field sequences: the report in China. This gradual change of pace allows to avoid the pitfall of the documentary “catalogue of examples”.
While the threat of a resurgence of the pandemic is very real, we must nevertheless distinguish the notion of security from that of safety: a feeling of security is not automatically linked to the certainty that there is no danger.