FACE_It!

 “Who owns the face that has become a numerical code?” This is the question asked by German film director Gerd Conradt in a film centred on addressing the social consequences of the new Facial Action Coding System (FACS) technology. The FACS technology is already used at the Berlin Südkreuz railway station, where passengers’ faces are recorded with cameras and automatically identified. Data privacy specialists, artists and the German State Minister for Digitalisation all have their say in response to this core question – and the outcome is a documentary film that offers diverse perspectives and does not hesitate to classify technological progress in either optimistic or critical terms.