The Spying Thing

Three stories of espionage in the Middle East, with images shot on a trip to Cairo in 2016, another to Tehran in 2008 and never-seen-before footage from Sana'a, Yemen. A love story and a suspense tale, mixed in with a dash of comedy and paranoia.

Impressive docudrama set in Korea about interrogation techniques used on prisoners. Was not allowed to be screened for 45 years.

Frisian double agent Mata Hari was the inspiration for Von Sternberg and his star Marlene Dietrich in this atmospheric thriller where espionage is principally a higher form of flirting, with huge interests at stake. During the First World War, a seductive widow is recruited by Austria as spy 'X27'.

Some time in the 1980s, in the Argentine pampas, four female spies have to successfully complete ‘Operation Hercules’. In the morning, a life-and-death confrontation awaits them – but until then we crisscross the world, taking in tangents and prequels. A narrative masterpiece.

Before the rest of the world was confronted with the omnipresence of cameras, prisons were filled with surveillance equipment to spy on the inmates. Inspired by thinkers such as Deleuze and Foucault, Harun Farocki analyses the power of the camera as spy and control weapon, with shots and scenes from (prison) films by Bresson and Genet.

As a protest against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, an ordinary Polish accountant set himself alight at a harvest festival. More than 20 years later, director Maciej Drygas constructed a film of impressive significance around the images of this apparently pointless suicide.

Akerman couldn’t leave her room in Tel Aviv due to terror attacks. From her apartment, she spies on neighbouring apartments. A truly voyeuristic film.

An almost forgotten, unloved John Huston Cold War espionage film – or anti-espionage film? – with Paul Newman as a British(!) secret agent who has to infiltrate a scary Communist club. Yet the often inimitable plot and atmospheric confusion are among the unmistakable, retiring charms of this film. Also starring James Mason and Dominique Sanda.

Anti-Communist drama produced during the height of McCarthyism. A mother discovers that her returning son has a head filled with strange ideas.

The Iron Curtain closes in on a man suffering from amnesia after a terrible accident when the West German intelligence service sends him back to Prague. Disguised as a sad clown, he sets out to retrieve a microfilm in this spy tale by Zbyněk Brynych, as psychologically complex as it is visually rewarding.

Gripping, stylish narrative based on the true story of South Korea’s espionage operation, focused around the undercover agent 'Black Venus',

Farewell project by the legendary Grigori Alexandrov, co-director of October. This grandly dressed-up melodrama, in which the Soviets fulfil the role of international peacemaker, is about the espionage couple Starling and Lyre who worked against the Germans during and after World War II. Yet the film suddenly disappeared from Russian cinemas after only a couple of screenings.

Chillingly simple and riveting found-footage documentary on a reconstructed murder. The original film was produced by the Dubai State Security service.

Nemes (Son of Saul) made this irresistibly beautiful pre-WWI paranoid thriller. Mysterious Irisz arrives in Budapest and is suddenly confronted with her past.

Bulgarian super-spy Emil Boyev – clever, sexy, cool – starts working for electronics company Zodiac, a cover for a western spy organisation in Berlin. Unlike many Eastern Bloc spy films, there is not much propaganda; rather an elegant and melancholy undertone, reminiscent of the Nouvelle Vague – but the Bulgarian version.