Tarquin Ramsay was 15 years old when he first asked himself what the freedom of speech means. Because the young Brit dreams of becoming a filmmaker, his father urges him to ask his friends and classmates about it and to document it with a camera. The insecure and helpless answers to this big topic only cause Tarquin to have more questions than answers. The idea for his first big film project is hereby born. The pitch is: can we be human without the freedom of speech? Is it the oxygen that our society needs? He doesn’t just reach out to his direct environment this time, he also turns to world-renowned experts and personalities. He meets Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and CIA torture whistleblower John Kiriakou, actor Jude Law, as well as members of the free theatre in Belarus. The journey leads him to Berlin, a place with one of the most intense surveillance histories in the world and a place of refuge for the digital civil rights movement today. While in Berlin, he talks to a hacker collective, British journalist Sarah Harrison, and US surveillance activist living in exile Jacob Applebaum. Tarquin is 20 by now and a film student. FREE SPEECH FEAR FREE is his first big documentary. It’s not only interesting because he belongs to the millennial generation who are digital natives and only know a world of permanent (voluntary) surveillance, but also because his childishly simple questions help crystallize this seemingly self-evident basic right.

Jens Mayer

Translation: Elinor Lewy