Eric & "Anna"
2015 · 14m · United States
Directed by Katie Galloway, Kelly Duane de la Vega
Genres: crime, documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, dark, provocative
Built entirely from surveillance footage, the film examines an FBI informant — a 17-year-old community-college student recruited by the Bureau — and Eric McDavid, the activist she helped send to prison for ten years.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone expects a surveillance doc to indict the watchers, but Galloway and de la Vega flip it — the footage becomes a mirror that refuses easy villainy on either side, which is exactly the kind of unsettling moral vertigo most festivals would sand down.
The formal restraint here is extraordinary: by letting the surveillance material speak without voiceover moralizing, the directors locate themselves in a rigorous documentary tradition while asking questions about complicity and innocence that essays rarely touch—this is the kind of work that justifies the form.
The decision to build the entire architecture from found footage rather than contextualize it could've felt like a gimmick, but the editing rhythm—the specific pacing of what's revealed and withheld—transforms raw Bureau material into something that feels like a moral argument made in cuts.
Reviews
The Bay Area filmmaking team of Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega hasn't exactly parachuted into the zone of conflict between government surveillance and civil rights. It's a topic they've been addressing, in one form or another, for nearly 20 years.