Erin Barnett '09 edited and co-wrote the film "The Great Hack," which explores data exploitation through personal stories surrounding the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal that influenced the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Get your popcorn ready.
Popular streaming service Netflix, as well as select theaters across the United States, will soon feature new work by Erin Barnett '09.
Barnett edited and co-wrote "The Great Hack," a 2019 Sundance-selected documentary. The film explores data exploitation as told through the personal journeys of people on different sides of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica data breach that influenced the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
The film was one of 112 selected for Sundance from 14,259 submissions across 152 countries.
Directed by Academy Award nominees Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim, the film will be released on Netflix on Wednesday, July 24.
The trailer for "The Great Hack" had already notched more than 1 million views on YouTube before its public release and the film has garnered reviews from The Guardian, The New York Times, Rolling Stone and others.
"The Great Hack" joins a list of several notable projects by Barnett. Her other works include "Food Chains," a documentary about agricultural labor in the United States; "Unseen Enemy," a CNN documentary exploring global pandemic; and "Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine," a film by Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney.
In November 2018, Barnett received the first-ever elondoc Emerging Documentarian Award. The award recognizes alumni who graduated in the past decade and have already excelled in the professional documentary field.
While studying at Elon, Barnett completed two films — “Bridging the Digital Divide,” shot at the first-ever global Internet Governance Forum for the Imagining the Internet Center, and “My Name is Anita,” about Namibian AIDS activist Anita Isaacs for Elon’s Project Pericles.