This is the third in a series of four case stories we researched while developing Prenups for Filmmakers and Faith Rooted Partners, commissioned by our friends at Hartley Media Impact Initiative at Auburn Seminary. Customized from our original model, these Prenups draw deeply on the candor and analysis of directors, clergy, impact producers, faith-based groups, funders, and others (sometimes unusual bedfellows) as they built trust around a film focused on surveillance. We are grateful to everyone — quoted or behind the scenes — who shared their wisdom with us.
Table of Contents
The Feeling of Being Watched weaves the personal and the political as director Assia Boundaoui examines how her community fell under blanket government surveillance in one of the largest counterterrorism investigations ever conducted in the U.S. Many residents in Arab-American neighborhood outside of Chicago where Assia grew up thought they had been under surveillance, even before 9/11. While investigating their experiences, Assia uncovers tens of thousands of pages of FBI documents that prove her hometown was a subject of what was code-named “Operation Vulgar Betrayal.” With unprecedented access, Assia struggles to disrupt the government secrecy and takes the FBI to federal court to compel them to make the records they collected about her community public. Part investigative, and extremely personal, the film follows Assia as she pieces together this secret FBI operation while grappling with the effects of a lifetime of surveillance on herself and her family.
The Feeling of Being Watched on POV
2014- Preproduction
2015-7 Production
2018: Festivals, Community Screenings, and Digital Distribution
2019: PBS Broadcast on POV
A grant of $200,000 enabled the producer and the outreach consultant to provide consultation, partner development, and the rights to use the film free of charge to all partners.
The vision was to create a film with a community engagement campaign that would bring to light the underrepresented story of the impact of surveillance on targeted communities. The film and early stages of the campaign were informed by those directly impacted by those policies, starting with Assia’s family members and neighbors, community organizers and leaders in her community, and also with leading teams working on the issues of surveillance and government overreach. Together they strived to:
-Enable collective healing in communities that have been traumatized by decades of government profiling and surveillance.
-Help community members, organizers, student leaders, and activists across the country “change the narrative of fear” to one of healing, truth-seeking, and power
-Increase understanding the root causes, patterns of suffering and social impact of U.S. government surveillance on communities of color.
“I could tell right away that [the filmmakers] wouldn’t be prepared for the film to touch [audiences] so deeply. I certainly wasn’t.” – Kameelah Rashad, Founder, Muslim Wellness Foundation
The faith-rooted leader’s Muslim Wellness Foundation sought to:
-Strengthen a public-health approach to mutual care that draws on community wisdom.
-Provide framework and language for describing the psychological impacts of Islamophobia, racial battle fatigue, and trauma with a small “t”.
-Validate people’s feelings and normalize the emotion the film elicits, so people can tell their own stories.
The team organized free screenings in communities with large Muslim populations. In addition, local residents attended workshops on such topics as government accountability and how to file FOIA requests. Attuned to the emotional power of the film, the team partnered with the Muslim Wellness Foundation to create healing resources for audiences with direct experiences with surveillance. Together they created a Community Screening Healing Guide to help facilitate post-screening conversations. It includes “An Activist’s Guide to FOIA” (created by the Center for Constitutional Rights), links to online resources and workshops, and suggestions for hosting additional DIY screenings.
“Boundaoui’s smart, unsettling documentary functions both as a real-world conspiracy thriller and a personal reflection on the psychological strain of being made to feel an outsider in one’s own home.” – Guy Lodge, Variety
Film festivals attract audiences that often include film-buffs or curious neighbors; people who may not normally watch films about the consequences of government overreach. 
The Feeling of Being Watched drew a wide range of people, often with significant political savvy, to screenings and panels at 30 festivals, including Tribeca Film Festival (NYC), Hot Docs (Toronto), Camden International Film Festival, Chicago International Film Festival, and the Human Rights Film Festival. Each raised important discussions and offered mixed audiences ways to get involved. Theatres also featured the film in NY, LA, Seattle, Dearborn, San Francisco, and other locations.
The PBS series POV made the film available free of charge to almost every American household, and attracted national press. They organized community town hall meetings that featured the documentary and local mental health experts. POV also created a separate discussion guide to “…engage family, friends, classmates, colleagues and communities [to spearhead] conversations undertaken in a spirit of openness in which people try to understand one another and expand their thinking by sharing viewpoints and listening actively. ”With support of the robust educational distribution of Women Make Movies, the film has also been screened at dozens of universities, think tanks, and conferences.
Legally, as Anya noted, “The Boundaoui vs. FBI federal court case has reached a monumental juncture. In an unprecedented move, the presiding judge has ordered FBI agents to appear in court to answer questions about their decades-long surveillance of the Muslim community in Bridgeview, IL. The FBI has also admitted to having an additional 45,000 documents pertaining to another stage of Operation Vulgar Betrayal extending beyond 9/11.” In her 2020 book, Story Movements: How Documentaries Empower People and Inspire Social Change, Caty Borum Chattoo notes, “The fight for full transparency continues, but this is an incredible legal milestone.”
Working with MPower, the largest Muslim digital advocacy organization in the US, the film team launched “The Inverse Surveillance Project,” which was, as the filmmakers envisioned, “an action undertaken by the subjects of surveillance, of the systems of surveillance.” Digital tools and a DIY toolkit that enabled communities to facilitate screenings, town hall conversations, and spaces for healing in local communities across the country.
In addition to other partners, Assia reached out to Muslim Wellness Foundation (MWF), whose mission is to “reduce stigma and promote healing in the American Muslim community through dialogue, education and training… [through an] interdisciplinary approach which addresses mental health challenges using a spiritually relevant community-based public health framework.”
Assia wanted help creating a discussion guide for the Muslim community. MWF’s approach — which “recognizes the negative impact of stressors such as poverty, oppression, anti-Black racism, and anti-Muslim bigotry which lead to diminished wellbeing” — resonated deeply for the journalist/filmmaker.
“We started building trust at breakfast before a screening at the Islamic Society of North America conference,” recalled MWF founder Kameelah Rashad, a chaplain, facilitator, family therapist, and doctoral candidate in clinical psychology. “It was a pivotal moment. It wasn’t just about my job, or her job as a filmmaker. We were both willing to know each other. That level of trust and emotional intelligence in this relationship was very important and became part of the overall strategy.”
Kameelah watched the film and also kept an eye on the audience. “I could tell right away that they wouldn’t be prepared for the film to touch them so deeply,” she says. “I certainly wasn’t.” As Assia, Kameelah, and impact producer Ahlam Said worked together, new questions emerged: “‘What should we pay attention to, what resources would be most appropriate to continue these conversations as long as the film will be viewed?’” The team even included a “feeling wheel” as part of the guide, “a resource to improve emotional literacy and normalize the range of emotions people were experiencing” such as paranoia, anxiety, and isolation as a result of blanket government surveillance.
“Working with faith-rooted groups requires its own kind of research, deep relationship-building, and an understanding of their norms, customs, and culture. Who are the other leaders, trusted messengers, lay people and others who…have influence and [can] help facilitate conversations within the congregation?” – Anya Rous, Co-Producer
They knew that they couldn’t be at every event, so they organized an online “train the trainers” conversation to offer individuals tips for facilitating their own screenings. Knowing that there would be sensitivities in every community, they went well beyond the nuts and bolts. “We talked about how to take care of yourselves as organizers, what do you need to be prepared for as you host others. A lot of self-care work,” says Kameelah. Participants asked tough questions, she adds: “Some were ambivalent: ‘What happens if we even publicize the address of the screening? Will there be people monitoring who attends? And if we have people register online, where is the sign-up info going?’”
In the film, Assia tells a story about her own family, her community, and her ultimately victorious, if harrowing, search for the truth. Kameelah helped other families and communities use the film to safely and therapeutically tell their own stories about being watched. “That’s healing justice, Kameelah noted. “Mindful of how you care for people…that’s part of justice work.”
The team thought deeply about their own agency as storytellers, artists, activists, and organizers in creating the film and the impact campaign. Director and investigative journalist Assia Boundaoui captures her family’s story over two decades of surveillance and anxiety, and those of neighbors who trusted her with their own experiences. Impact producer Ahlam Said is a veteran grassroots and digital organizer within the Muslim community. Co-producer Anya Rous had worked for a decade at the intersection of racial and social justice and media and works across film projects at Multitude to advise on community engagement campaigns for their films.
They understood the diversity within faith-rooted communities, and knew they’d need to customize their approach for various Muslim communities, such as black Muslims, non-Arabic Muslims, or immigrant or multi-generation Americans. For example, their Town Hall events were focused on those most directly affected by the film’s topic. As Anya Rous observed: “There are a multiplicity of experiences and identities across Muslim communities, and a range of experiences of surveillance. They’ve been treated differently based on their racial identities, gender, and immigration status. After our screenings an overwhelming number of people stood up to share deeply personal stories of their own direct experience with surveillance.”
As Anya shared, “Working with faith-rooted groups requires its own kind of research, deep relationship-building, and an understanding of their norms, customs, and culture. When engaging lay organizers to collaborate around screenings, it helps to have a sense of their leadership in the community, to what extent they’ve already organized events, and who else may be important to engage early in the process. Who are the other leaders, trusted messengers, lay people and others who are well situated to have influence and help facilitate conversations within the congregation?’”
As the relationships developed, the conversations became even more practical. “Our theatrical run was close to Ramadan,” she recalled. “So together we weighed the relative merits of linking the film to the holidays, or postponing our screenings and events until after them.” For our longer screening and town hall, we wanted to serve delicious and familiar food,” she continued, “because we were asking people to spend quite a few hours with us. Given the trauma of these FBI programs that were surfaced in the film and hence in the community’s memories, Assia also wanted the events themselves to have “a quality of healing, of spaciousness and nourishment.”
As Anya noted, “Not every filmmaker wants to organize the impact campaign. Not all impact strategists can or want to be a filmmaker. Some of these skills converge, while others are very specific. In other words, assuming that anyone connected to the creative process can accomplish every task is unrealistic: both strategy and storytelling require particular talents. Film teams that are building their impact teams should consider: who is best prepared to build community around a film and its issue?”
“This riveting film is at once a personal story, a journalistic thriller and an essay on the nature of paranoia.” – Ben Kenigsberg, The New York Times
Smart strategists and impact teams build flexibility into their plans because so many real-life factors are unpredictable: funders may change and new opportunities often emerge. It proved increasingly hard to fund the 10-city tour they’d envisioned until finally it was out of reach. In the meantime, the intensity of the story and its impact on individual viewers took center stage. The original focus on FOIA and “know your rights” shifted as community members stepped up at events — often speaking up publicly for the first time about the emotional impact of surveillance. The deep need for group healing was palpable, and the film team realized that their presence wasn’t always necessary. They turned to MPower and other partners to help create resources that communities could use on their own.
The film and the campaign took five years to make, including a full year of relationship-building. Ultimately, the combined effort opened the door for thousands of people from Muslim and non-Muslim communities to connect, acknowledge their lived experience, and connect to local efforts working to challenge surveillance and racial profiling in their communities.
“It would be important to include someone like me [trained and credentialed in psychology] at the very beginning of production to bring a mental health lens through all stages of the project.”
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