“It’s probably just the FBI, go back to sleep,” a bleary-eyed mom reassures her antsy daughter near the beginning of “The Feeling of Being Watched,” responding to some indeterminate hubbub in the quiet suburbia outside.
She says it with a weary shrug, as if she were describing hard rain on the roof or a raccoon going through the garbage — for Arab-American filmmaker Assia Boundaoui and her family, the FBI’s presence on their unremarkable, mostly Muslim-populated Chicago street has become an equivalently banal distraction over more than 20 years.
But what are the feds looking for, and after years of seemingly fruitless surveillance, how is their continued scrutiny and racial targeting justified? Equal parts angry and anxious, Boundaoui’s smart, unsettling documentary functions both as a real-world conspiracy thriller and a personal reflection on the psychological strain of being made to feel an outsider in one’s own home.
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