Submitted by the Friday Harbor Film Festival

The following are upcoming events sponsored by the Friday Harbor Film Festival. Films will be shown at 7 p.m. at the San Juan Island Grange.

May 1: “A Good American”

This movie tells the extraordinary story of the best code-breaker the United States has ever had and how he and a small team within the U.S. National Security Agency created a surveillance tool that could pick up any electronic signal on Earth, filter it for targets and render results in real-time while keeping the privacy as demanded by the U.S. Constitution. The tool was perfect – except for one thing: it was way too cheap. Therefore NSA leadership, who had fallen into the hands of the industry, dumped it three weeks prior to 9/11. In a secret test-run of the program against the NSA database in early 2002, the program immediately found the terrorists. This is the story of former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney and a program called ThinThread.

May 15: “Harry and Snowman”

This heartwarming tale depicts a Dutch immigrant, Harry deLeyer, who journeyed to the United States after World War II and developed a transformative relationship with a broken down Amish plow horse he rescued off a slaughter truck bound for the glue factory. He paid $80 for the horse and named him Snowman. In less than two years, deLeyer and Snowman went on to win the triple crown of show jumping, beating the nation’s blue bloods. They were famous for their day and traveled around the world together. Their chance meeting at a Pennsylvania horse auction saved them both and crafted a friendship that lasted a lifetime. Eighty-six-year-old deLeyer tells their Cinderella love story firsthand, as he continues to train on today’s show jumping circuit.