James Graham’s new short film People You May Know on the growing influence of big data and algorithms on our day-to-day lives, starring Lydia West and Arthur Darvill, is released today via ft.com/drama and the FT’s YouTube channel.
“Future schoolchildren, studying the great pandemic of 2020, are going to be able to draw their own map of person to person contact.
We have it all, it’s all stored: every human interaction, every footstep, every message.”
Directed by the FT’s Juliet Riddell, People You May Know investigates how the response to COVID-19 has accelerated the intrusion of the data state into people’s private and emotional lives and what it might mean for our future. It revolves around the interrogation of a junior barrister, played by Lydia West (star of the recent Channel 4 drama It’s A Sin), by Arthur Darvill (Doctor Who and Broadchurch), a data analyst from a private software firm, about her behaviour during lockdown, as monitored by her internet-connected devices.
As part of the research for the film, James Graham, along with representatives of Sonia Friedman Productions, met a group of leading Financial Times tech journalists and experts to discuss the role of data and the reach of algorithms in society today.
“The data knows best, and that’s why we must hand ourselves over to it.”
FT Assistant Editor Janine Gibson said: “Our goal for FT Film is to continue to innovate and develop compelling stories. In collaborating with the arts world, journalists can learn new ways of communicating the real-world impact behind the facts we uncover. The results, as shown by this film, can be truly powerful.”
Sonia Friedman said: “Drama, like journalism, exists to ask important questions of the contemporary world and one of those questions is our relationship to data. The advantages of our information age have rarely been as overt as in this extraordinary year, but as James Graham’s potent and unsettling theatrical short film People You May Know makes clear, they are not without disconcerting and complicated trade-offs. James is a writer with the keenest of moral compasses, and his astute dramatic eye – along with pinpoint performances by Lydia West and Arthur Darvill – brings a flush of feeling to the Financial Times’ rigorous journalistic enquiry.”
Standpoint is an FT Film series in which FT journalists, creative artists and experts collaborate to explore the stories of our time and communicate subjects in a different form. Previous FT films have focused on climate change, COVID-19, Brexit, homelessness and antibiotic resistance, with partners including the Royal Court Theatre, Sadlers Wells, Nicola Walker, Stephen Rea and Yo-Yo Ma.
