The Bystander Story

Streaming video - 2021

Fuses studio re-enactments, interviews, archival, bodycam and CCTV footage to tell a radically new story about psychology’s bystander experiments. It begins in 1964 with the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese in New York. Thirty-eight witnesses watched the attack – and did nothing. Allegedly. Psychologists claimed that the more onlookers on a scene, the less likely it was that any of them would help. Yet there is growing evidence to the contrary. The film investigates how strangers come together to help strangers – culminating with the bystanders who tried to prevent the killing of George Floyd. With a tilt at documentary noir, the film uses a minimalist set and imaginative lighting to shift the action from Sydney to London to Seoul �...� and elsewhere. An ensemble of six actors play a range of contemporary urban dwellers. Sometimes they’re onlookers who find themselves caught up, or intervening in threatening situations. Sometimes they’re people trying to make sense of it afterwards. Analysis from psychologist Mark Levine provides the film’s narrative spine. Think of him as our expert witness. more