Predators

Q&A with director David Osit on October 15

2025. 96 m. David Osit. mTuckman Media. US. English. Rated NR.

Dateline NBC’s candid-camera investigative series To Catch a Predator became a television sensation by luring sex offenders to a film set where they were interviewed and arrested as cameras rolled. The show was a hit that transformed its host Chris Hansen into a moral crusader and TV star, while spawning a worldwide industry of imitators and vigilantes.

Looking back on the show and the countless franchises it spawned, filmmaker David Osit turns his camera on journalists, actors, law enforcers, academics, and ultimately himself, to trace America’s obsession with watching people at their lowest.

Official Selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival

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"Osit’s brilliant, subtly needling film leaves us unnerved and alert, but not certain of our convictions—an outcome, perhaps, that more true-crime programming should pursue."
Guy Lodge, Variety

"Filmmaker David Osit... takes a cold, hard look at how the show has popularized vigilante justice and repurposed it as reality TV entertainment, spawned copycats who maybe—maybe—have sacrificed ethics for clicks and lolz, and stripped any sense of empathy from the equation."
David Fear, Rolling Stone

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Q&A with director David Osit

Wednesday, Oct. 15 2025, 7:15

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David Osit is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning director, editor and composer. His most recent film Mayor won a Peabody and Emmy Award, was a New York Times Critics’ Pick, and holds a 100% Certified Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. David directed, produced, edited, filmed and composed the feature documentary Thank You For Playing, which broadcast on POV in 2016, and was nominated for three Emmy awards, winning for Outstanding Arts & Culture Documentary. He also edited and produced Off Frame, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and Berlinale in 2016, and he edited, produced and composed No Man’s Land, which premiered at the 2017 Tribeca Film Festival and broadcast on PBS Independent Lens in 2018. David’s feature directorial debut, Building Babel, premiered at True/False in 2012 and broadcast as the series premiere of PBS’s America Reframed in 2013. His work as an editor and consulting editor includes Procession (Netflix), Crime + Punishment (Hulu) and The Vow (HBO). He holds a BA in Middle Eastern and North African Studies from the University of Michigan as a Wallenberg Fellow and studied Refugee Law at the American University in Cairo.