Movie Maven @ The San Francisco Film Festival: Secrecy

May 7, 2008

This year’s San Francisco International Film Festival ( www.sffs.org ) April 24-May 8 offers a fabulous selection of some 175 films—dramas, comedies, documentaries, shorts, and more— from every corner of the globe.

Up Thursday, May 8 at the Berkeley’s Pacific Film Archive at 3:15 p.m. is the West Coast premiere of Secrecy, Peter Galison and Rob Moss’ exploration of the world of U.S. government document classification, national security policy and growing secrecy. The film covers the history of the classification craze from World War II and the creation of the atom bomb through September 11 and recent abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Now, some 70 years following the creation of our national security system, are we living in a system where security erodes or enhances our security? In a single year, the U.S. government classified nearly five times the number of pages added to the Library of Congress at a staggering cost of about $8 billion to keep these unknown secrets secret. The film uses penetrating interviews with journalists, CIA analysts, lawyers, and others to explore recent troubling trends.

Peter Galison is a professor of physics and history of science at Harvard University and Rob Moss in an independent film producer and Harvard film professor who most recent film is “The Same River Twice.”