Sundance review: 'All Light, Everywhere' is a deep intellectual dive into what we see, and how we see, in our surveillance society

‘All Light, Everywhere’

★★★1/2

Appearing in the U.S. Documentary competition of the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. Running time: 105 minutes.

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Director Theo Anthony considers what we we look at and look with, and the biases inherent in both, in “All Light, Everywhere,” a documentary that’s literally eye-opening.

The film’s unseen narrator (voiced by Keaver Brenai) begins with the observation that the optic nerve — the spot where the signals go from the eye to the brain — is a blind spot in our retina, and that our brains fill in the gaps. Much of what we view, and the technology we use to do that, work in much the same way, Anthony argues.

As a case example, Anthony visits Axon Enterprise Inc., the Scottsdale, Ariz., company that holds 85% of the market share for body cameras sold to law enforcement across the United States. (The company used to be called Taser International, and they make those, too.) A genial company PR guy shows Anthony’s cameras around the plant, and explains how the cameras work and details the features that make them popular with cops nationwide — like how they don’t us infrared or other parts of the spectrum past what a human eye can see, so such footage doesn’t end up in front of a jury.

We also meet Ross McNutt, whose company Persistent Surveillance Systems uses aerial surveillance to create what McNutt alls “Google Earth in real time.” The company ran its surveillance system for the Baltimore Police from May to August 2016, a program unknown even to the city’s mayor. The program was discontinued when word got out; there’s an extended scene of McNutt going to a community meeting in one of Baltimore’s predominantly Black neighborhoods to lobby to restart the program, and he gets an earful.

One thread of Anthony’s narrative is that such programs, and the arguments about their fairness, are not new. Paris police were taking pictures of criminals they arrested as far back as the 1840s — but they didn’t have the photos organized until Alphonse Bertillon, a police officer and biometrics researcher, put the photos on file cards with other measurements to create the first criminal data file.

But every system, even those that use technology to remove the human factor, has its biases, Anthony notes. Police body cameras don’t really show what the officer is doing, as they’re advertised, because the camera points away from the officer — making the officer’s body the blind spot.

Anthony deconstructs the documentary form as he constructs his arguments, creating a film that’s as intellectually challenging as it is visually striking. It’s also a lot to digest, and may be the only Sundance documentary I’ve ever seen that included a bibliography in the credits. “All Light, Everywhere” is a movie that will make you think, and think twice, about what’s really being watched in our surveillance-heavy society.