Film screening
Netwars

Director: Marcel Kolvenbach, B & W, colour, 90 min., 2015

14.12.2017
1 PM


01:00

Film screening as part of Festival Film Dokumenter (FFD) Yogyakarta 2017


Modern industrial technology is highly vulnerable. Our infrastructure, which is now 100% digitally-based, can be all too easily circumvented. Digital warfare is no longer the stuff of science fiction, but a daily reality.

Digital warfare has long been more than just science fiction. It is a daily reality and a threat to us all. Netwars makes the dangers tangible – solidly documented, the film illuminates potential, and, for the most part, already real-life scenarios: what might happen and what is happening already – largely unnoticed by the average user.

“An individual armed with just a laptop can now cause more destruction than a conventional weapon like a bomb!” With this statement from Ian West, Director of Cyber Security at NATO, Marcel Kolvenbach’s documentary dives into the hidden world of cyber war. The search for clues leads to cyber arsenals in Israel, red hackers in China and the world’s largest hacker convention in the USA, where NSA chief Keith Alexander is celebrated.

In virtual chats, global experts exchange information about the state of virtual warfare. They realise that the arms race has already begun. Soon hackers will not only be able to use digital attacks to bring down individual aircraft from the sky – but entire fleets. But how much of that is science fiction? Scaremongering, media hype? And how vulnerable are we today in Germany, France, Europe?

An elite hacker from Berlin, Felix “FX” Lindner, carries out a test. Armed with laptops, he makes headway in hacking into a power supplier on the German-French border. An attack made to order, for the managing director would like to safeguard his company while knowing how much at risk it is. The results are startling. This attack is not staged. It actually took place and the results have been hotly debated in the energy sector ever since. Absolute security will never exist, the stakeholders fear. For this reason, cyber war experts, such as Dr Sandro Gaycken and Professor Volker Roth, are calling for a completely new IT infrastructure and critical infrastructure: “The computer has to be reinvented.”

The film by Marcel Kolvenbach is an independent section within a cross-media project consisting of documentary film, web documentary, graphic novel app and fictional TV series. Shooting Netwars presented the writer and director with the challenge of depicting an invisible war in sounds and images. Therefore, the filmmaker continually reached for the camera himself with the goal of documenting the disappearance of people and humanity in empty spaces. Kolvenbach feels the real danger for our lives lies in the disintegration of the analogue world into zeros and ones. For him, this new and progressive form of war is just the logical continuation of our world’s dematerialisation.

Participants in front of the camera

Frank Boldewin (IT security engineer, Münster), David A. Sanger (journalist specialising in IT, Washington), Ian J. West (Director of Cyber Security, NATO), Volker Roth (Professor of Secure Identity, FU Berlin), Sandro Gaycken (government adviser for cyber security, Berlin), Felix "FX" Lindner (Managing Director, Recurity Labs, Berlin), Erez Kreiner (Ex-director, National Cyber Security Authority, Tel Aviv), Erel Margalit (Jerusalem Venture Partners, Jerusalem), Ehud Barak (former Prime Minister of Israel, Tel Aviv), Guy Mizrahi (founder and Managing Director of Cyberia, Tel Aviv), Daniel Statman (Professor of Philosophy, Haifa), Jason Healey (Director, Cyber Statecraft Initiative, The Atlantic Council, New York), Eberhard Oehler (Managing Director, Municipal Utilities, Ettlingen), Gabi Siboni (Director, Cyber Warfare Programme INSS, Tel Aviv), Tao Wan (hacker, Shanghai), Ulf Feger (Cyber Security Officer, Huawei Tec Germany, Düsseldorf)

Biography

Marcel Kolvenbach has worked for 20 years as a freelance documentary filmmaker for German and international television broadcasters. He teaches the course “Audiovisual Storytelling” at the University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf, Department of Design.
 

Filmography

2014 Die Kunstbewegung Zero
2013 NETWARS
2013 Atomic Africa
2009 Koka, Terror und der Inka Aufstand
2006 Hillarys Reise zum Mond

Ralph Eue, 26.11.2015