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The half-animated, half-live-action short documentary You’ve Never Been Completely Honest (2022) chronicles a disturbing story at the advent of the oft-overlapping self-help and multilevel-marketing industries. Rendered in gut-wrenching detail by the US director Joey Izzo, the film recalls a four-day ‘leadership seminar’ in 1970 in Palo Alto, California, for male employees of the the multilevel cosmetics marketing company Holiday Magic Inc. Izzo builds his intentionally unpleasant visuals around a never-before-heard recording of an interview with a man named Gene Church, who attended the seminar and later wrote about his experience. Through Church’s harrowing account, Izzo depicts how this seemingly benign-sounding work event descended into violence, depravity and nearly death – all without losing a single participant before its end. The film ultimately connects the story to the rise of the modern multibillion-dollar self-help industry, providing some unsettling insights into social psychology and group dynamics that are still relevant today.
Director: Joey Izzo
Producers: Andy Ruse, Jesy Odio
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Consciousness and altered states
You need to make friends with pain to run through the Grand Canyon and back
5 minutes
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Art
Grotesque imagery meets religious conservatism in Hieronymus Bosch’s art
51 minutes
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Architecture
Why a sculptor pivoted from gallery installations to big-box stores design
9 minutes
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Mathematics
How a verbal paradox shattered the notion of total certainty in mathematics
5 minutes
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Wellbeing
A tender poem doubles as a guide to sitting comfortably in one’s own company
3 minutes
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Values and beliefs
How a God-fearing Jewish woman found atheism – and bacon – in her later years
9 minutes
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War and peace
Before he leaves to go to war, Artem, 18, says goodbye to the man who raised him
12 minutes
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Art
A mindbending trip that summons the forgotten women of surrealism
17 minutes
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Metaphysics
To see the Universe more clearly, think in terms of processes, not objects
6 minutes