A Spotlight on Uyghurs

Image attribution: FIFDH Zed Nelson & Studio BAD

by Nadir Gerber

In a room that prohibits photography, Daya Cahen, director-producer of Eyes of the Machine, asks, “How do you visualize something that cannot be seen?”

Eyes of the Machine, a documentary film on Uyghur persecution, made its international debut at FIFDH in Geneva following an initial Dutch release. It follows Kalbinur Sidik, a Uyghur political refugee, as she recounts her experience of surveillance and subjugation at the hands of the Chinese state. Technology as a silent observer is omnipresent. Not only is it through the lens of the documentarian’s camera that the story unfolds, but even that which hides itself–psychological abuse, religious persecution, concentration camps–makes its way on-screen. In one shot of the film, the camera watches a bright blue sky through a car’s front windshield. The audience looks at the reflection of a phone upon the car’s dashboard superimposed above in place of clouds. The phone, in turn, looks back.

In the Chinese-administered autonomous region of Xinjiang–alternatively known as East Turkestan by those seeking the territory’s independence–cell phone data, personal networks, and a panopticon of cameras facilitate the categorization of Uyghurs according to their apparent risk of partaking in Islamic extremism. To whom one speaks, whether one prays, and whether one grows a beard or wears a modest skirt are all recorded and tallied as evidence for whether one should be sent for involuntary re-education. Surveillance creeps into the mind and into homes. ”In a fight, [a family member] could say, ‘I will report you to the government,’” Kalbinur recalls. “China’s arm can reach you anywhere.” Alerk Ablikim, a former activist who contributed to the film’s translation, echoes this sentiment, seeing state surveillance and repression as rendering a “dystopic future” that others can hardly imagine but constitutes the everyday experience of Uyghurs in and around Urumqi.

Yet where technology is an instrument of oppression, it is also through the private proliferation of cell-phone footage that the realities of Chinese actions are revealed. Such videos–frequently taken by the perpetrators of the actions in question–visualizes the truth of Kalbinur’s and others’ testimonies. The paradox of technology as an instrument both of oppression and of liberation is not lost on Cahen who sees that “both ends of the [dichotomy] are very present” in her filmmaking. Ultimately, technology is not itself autonomous but exists as a tool to be leveraged by, for, and against others. 

Uyghur persecution is a cyclic and marginal subject within the public consciousness. Finding particular sympathetic attention from the international community following The New York Times’ leak of The Xinjiang Papers in 2019, conversations have nevertheless failed to meaningfully advance. This theme repeats in cinema. Laura Matringe, an intern with FIFDH and first-year MINT student at the Geneva Graduate Institute, noted that films about Uyghur persecution have featured twice before at FIFDH but that each iteration fails to say anything new. 

Amidst the current political destabilization of multilateralism and references to China usurping the US as the global hegemon, some commentators have raised concerns about the capacity or interest of the international community to address human rights violations. Ablikim is rather more skeptical about this being a sudden barrier to Uyghur activism. As he points out, “in our case, the Uyghur case, the mechanisms that were there in the rules-based order could never have really helped us” due to China’s veto as a permanent member of the UN Security Council and the broader influence it holds over the voting bloc of the Global South. 

Despite these mechanisms’ failures, he positively cited how the rules-based order and related moral regime created a framework of pointing out and criticizing human rights abuses. “In the current day and age,” he said, “that framework is being eroded.”

Absent a normative appeal to human rights, activist strategies may have to develop more pragmatic appeals to state interests. Raising the example of Tibet, Ablikim notes that state opposition to China’s construction of the Medog Hydropower Station was more effectively roused not by invoking the ways in which the project exploits Tibetan land and resources but rather by the downstream economic impacts it could have on India and Bangladesh. In the new world order, human rights are not themselves worth preserving but only secondary consequences of inter-state power struggles. Notably, in the case of the hydropower project, this strategy failed, and construction began on 19 July, 2025.

As drone and cell-phone footage bring the daily visualization of war to social media, the existence of atrocities that cannot be seen seems inconceivable. In the case of the Uyghur people, for all the obscurity, this is not an invisible situation nor one to which the world has been rendered blind. Rather more bleakly, the audience must ask whether we face not only a future but also a present that sees but does not care.