Total Trust
Film
Friday, 06 Mar 2026
How far can trust go when surveillance becomes the norm?
The multi-award-winning documentary Total Trust by Chinese director Jialing Zhang (including the German Documentary Film Award 2024 and the Grimme Award 2025) offers a disturbing and incisive portrait of digital control and its consequences for freedom, fear, and social cohesion.
Total Trust is an eye-opening and deeply disturbing story of surveillance technology, abuse of power and (self-)censorship that confronts us with what can happen when our privacy is ignored. Through the haunting stories of people in China who have been monitored, intimidated and even tortured, the filmtells of the dangers of technology in the hands of unbridled power. Taking China as a mirror, Total Trust sounds an alarm about the increasing use of surveillance tools around the world – even by democratic governments like those in Europe. If this is the present, what is our future?
If this is the present, what is our future?
Jialing Zhang | DE/NL 2023 | 97 min
