THE CLEANERS

Directors
Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck
(Feature Debut)

The tidying up on the agenda of documentary THE CLEANERS is that of which occurs online by employees based in the Philippines outsourced of Silicon Valley, California. These young people in Manila are employed as content moderators, whose job description details were kept secret until now. For several hours per day, a content moderator must view one image after another, and watch countless videos that are uploaded by people from all around the world, with the purpose of deciding what remains online and what is deleted forever. They are instructed to follow a particular set of guidelines from their superiors in Silicon Valley as they sift through masses of digital media material that isn’t just often extremely confronting and disturbing, but exhibits strong violent, graphic and criminal activity.

Striking questions derived from its subject are raised, but THE CLEANERS isn’t well-equipped to source the damning answers it provokes. For instance, at what point does art become propaganda and how far can one person go until their online illustration is permanently deleted from the World Wide Web? The duration spent on this topic is far too brief. Also, our attentions are sporadically diverted to a meeting that intends to understand and uncover the truth behind how social media giants Facebook and Twitter, and Google suppress certain content in select countries and what controls are in place to prevent online advocating of criminal activities. In addition to that, how they may even contribute towards hate crimes carried out in regions of the world. When the focus momentarily shifts to these pressing matters, this documentary instantly makes headway to something much more compelling and worthy of a full-length feature. Fact is, THE CLEANERS only scratches the surface of the web of secrecy there is to unveil here and seems apprehensive to venture much further. Instead, the investigation keeps retreating to various aspects of a content moderator’s life. Sure enough, this is the foundation to kick-start this documentary and the content covered here is important too. Problem is, THE CLEANERS remains stagnant and repetitive on the subject. Furthermore, an unforgiveable lapse of judgment is made by the inexperienced directors where the line from informative to borderline sensationalism is crossed, and results in this documentary being macabre.