Totally Under Control, a 2021 documentary from Alex Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger, examines how the United States government handled the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
What is Totally Under Control about?
Built from interviews with public health officials, journalists and administration insiders, the film traces the timeline of the outbreak's arrival in the US and the decisions made in response to it. Rather than a single narrator walking viewers through events, the documentary lets contributors describe what they saw from inside hospitals, laboratories and government offices, piecing together a chronology of warnings, delays and shifting messaging. Archival footage of press briefings and public appearances is woven into those accounts, giving the film a document-driven, on-the-record shape rather than a dramatized retelling.
About the cast
The film draws its voice largely from director Alex Gibney's own on-camera presence and a roster of health officials and administration figures speaking about the period, with Anthony Fauci among the featured voices. Public figures such as Donald Trump, Mike Pence and Narendra Modi appear through archival footage and public statements rather than as participants sitting for new interviews, anchoring the documentary in real, on-the-record material.
Context & significance
The documentary sits within a wave of pandemic-era filmmaking that turned to firsthand testimony while the events were still recent, and its structure reflects that urgency, favoring direct accounts over hindsight commentary. As a work assembled largely from named officials and public record, it functions as a historical document of a specific and closely watched period as much as a piece of standalone storytelling.
Watching Totally Under Control on Ktime
Totally Under Control is available on K-Time with a Farsi dub and Farsi subtitles, opening the documentary up to Persian-speaking viewers who want to follow the testimony closely in their own language. The page itself is free to browse; watching the film calls for logging into a K-Time account. K-Time's Farsi-first design is built with the Iranian diaspora in mind, from menus to subtitle formatting.