( 1 ) While censorship is often linked to authoritarian governments, civil liberties groups and legal scholars warn that Western democracies are seeing an expansion of online regulation and increasingly intrusive safety requirements. These measures aim to limit illegal online activity, but critics argue they risk building broad surveillance systems and weakening long-standing protections for privacy and free expression.
Behind the ScenesFilmmaker Håvard Fossum on censorship.
Behind the ScenesFilmmaker Håvard Fossum on censorship.
Håvard Fossum is a Norwegian documentary filmmaker whose work blends journalism and anthropology with dark humor and satire. His films explore power dynamics and questions about freedom and democracy, often in counterintuitive, thought-provoking ways: For his 2020 documentary Meet the Censors, Fossum traveled to South Sudan, India, China, Iran, the United States and Germany to understand censorship from the perspective of the censors themselves.1
Daphnée Denis: What drew you to documentary filmmaking?
Håvard Fossum: Everything has to do with storytelling. For me, it wasn’t filmmaking itself that I was drawn to; I needed to find a medium for the type of stories I wanted to tell. Working on stories from the real world with real people felt like the most effective way to do that. I also use humor to lighten some of the serious topics—if you want to reach regular people, not just academics who are already interested in a given topic, it has to be in a form that is entertaining.
DD: How do you decide what makes a good documentary subject?
