The Targets

Directors : Myriam Lefkowitz & Simon Ripoll-Hurier
Country : France
Genre : Documentary
Length : 40’
Project state : Development
Budget : 65 000€
% Acquired Budget : 35 %
Production company: Les Volcans
Producer : Corinne Castel, Olga Rozenblum

In the heart of Silicon Valley in the 1970s, a group of scientists and psychics, under the aegis of the CIA, developed a technique that was supposed to allow anyone to channel their extra-sensory perceptions to produce descriptions of distant targets: “Remote Viewing”. Alone in a room and equipped with paper and pen, the “viewer” follows a protocol to organize his mental images, feelings and impressions. He focuses on a target that someone has chosen for him and which he knows nothing about. Blindly, he adds descriptors, adjectives, sketches, etc., and builds an image which is then compared to the target that one has chosen for him, most often a place. These experiments were conducted at SRI International, an iconic institution in Silicon Valley, the place in the world which shaped the fantasy that all information is available everywhere and at all times. According to this idea, “Remote Viewing” appears as one of the elements of a historical and theoretical network that has created these new superpowers. What if we used this CIA psychic weapon to spy on its hidden heirs and try to look through the “Iron Curtain” of Silicon Valley? Myriam Lefkowitz Simon Ripoll-Hurier

Cynthia Beatt