Winner of a Special Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, (T)ERROR follows a 63-year-old FBI informant from Brooklyn to Pittsburgh on an assignment to befriend a suspected Taliban sympathizer. Yet first-time filmmaking team Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe soon conducts an investigation of its own. Without notifying their subject or the FBI, they interview the suspect and set the statements of the watched against the opinions of the watchers, until that inevitable moment when the Feds decide how to act on their information. A rare inside look at FBI undercover tactics in progress, (T)ERROR offers a thought-provoking analysis of the FBI as crime stoppers rather than investigators in post-9/11 America. Cabral and Sutcliffe create an impressive and courageous documentary that underlines the troubling results of an all-anti-terror mandate: a reliance on past offenders for access and new agents, a growing tendency to equate suspicion with guilt, a scandal-driven press, and methods that stretch the definition of entrapment. Intense and intricately crafted, (T)ERRORr explores just how far we are going to prevent terror and exactly what liberties we are sacrificing to get there.

—Arthur Ryel-Lindsey

Directed by

David Felix Sutcliffe and Lyric R. Cabral