"Democracy", David Bernet, 2015. All rights reserved.David Bernet’s profoundly European film, Democracy, follows three years, pre- and post-Snowden revelations, in the lives of Jan Philipp Albrecht MEP (German Greens) reporting to EU Commissioner Viviane Reding. Here they are steering through controversial new regulation on data privacy rights, against resistance from big businesses working with large amounts of personal data. This is a film to live with and to revisit, so vertiginous are the insights into our modern conditions of existence. But it is also a thing of beauty, filling us with wonder at the digital world that we are in.
The regulation, one of the most important and historic pieces of legislation on behalf of European citizens for our times, updates and modernises the principles of the 1995 directive, setting out the rights of the individual and establishing the obligations of those responsible for the processing of the data. It establishes the methods for ensuring compliance as well as the scope of sanctions for those in breach of the rules.
