Those who were present at the 2022 IDFA might remember a charming older Englishman who was the subject of the documentary Much Ado About Dying. It should help the memory that that film premiered in the international competition category and won its director, Simon Chambers, the IDFA Award for Best Directing. Another charming Englishman—although not quite as old—has the camera trained on his face a few times in Synthetic Sincerity, a new documentary also showing as part of IDFA’s international competition.
This time the Englishman, director Marc Isaacs, shows up only occasionally on the screen but he does have a watchable aura. In any case, the film isn’t about him or may not even be about a human being. Isaacs has made a documentary film about artificial intelligence. Which should be simple enough, but he has also whipped in artificial elements like fiction into what is ostensibly nonfiction. The result is about as pleasing as it is confounding.
Isaacs appears to be approached by a new tech facility seeking to add life to its creations by adopting building blocks from documentaries he has made in the past. In return, Isaacs would get some understanding of how AI works. This is what Synthetic Sincerity is about. But only on the surface. The film is layered with shenanigans, some of which work, some of which go from frustrating to tolerable.
In the latter column: what is going on overall? For example, there is a glimpse of Uyghur and China politics and a question of whether AI can allow people to express things they ordinarily can’t. But that is a subject that a barely 60-minute documentary with other things on its mind can never hope to address to a degree that’ll satisfy even a half-interested viewer. The discussion, a diversion really, comes across like something that was included in the story because Synthetic Sincerity might otherwise come across as too slight.
In the former column: quirky exchanges between Isaacs and the AI’s winsome avatar. Onscreen, Isaacs has an endearingly unsure way of speaking, like a rain-beaten Hugh Grant. Where he stumbles out his intentions, the AI’s avatar is firmer. Their dynamic is not unlike what you’d get in a British romcom. Well, except that the alert viewer should have one question at the back of their mind: how exactly is the avatar aware of what is happening in Isaacs’ daily life?
The film does answer that question and does so humorously. But it doesn’t exactly land as well as it should have. The problem is that Isaacs and his co-conspirators (chiefly his writer Adam Ganz) weren’t so committed to mangling the answer to the film’s main query: what does truth mean when the human face is itself a lie? At some point, the lines between what is “actual” documentary and what is fictional in the film are tangled so much that the distinction becomes rather meaningless. Isaac does give the game away at some point in the last act but Synthetic Sincerity remains a film that should probably lead the viewer to seeking out an interview or two in a bid to find out what is true and what isn’t.
Isaacs is smart to understand, perhaps intuitively, that with all of these layers and layers of artifice in a documentary about artificial intelligence, an undoubtedly real-life person like himself is something of a masterstroke. It is why the documentary will do well on the festival circuit in the UK, US, and Europe: an affable man pops up from time to time to give the audience something lightly humorous to connect to. Of course, it helps that AI is also the topic du jour.
But the film should come with a warning: find and read an interview with the director after viewing.
Director: Marc Isaacs
Screenplay: Adam Ganz
Producer: Marc Isaacs for Marc Isaacs Films
Cinematography: Marc Isaacs
Editing: Marc Isaacs, David Charap
Sound: Sarah González Centeno
Sound Design: Dan Weinberg
Music: Yahli Lev
World Sales: Andana Films
Venue: IDFA (International Competition)
71 minutes
In English
