Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
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
video
Technology and the self
A filmmaker finds a tactile beauty in the creation of her prosthetic leg
11 minutes
video
Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes
video
Technology and the self
How the magic of photography brought Victorian England closer to the spirit realm
16 minutes
video
Neuroscience
Dog vision is a trendy topic, but what can we really know about how they see?
11 minutes
video
Biology
An elegy for a dying microbe explores what we really mean by ‘death’
9 minutes
video
Art
Creating art that was aware of itself – and the viewer – made Manet the first modernist
15 minutes
video
War and peace
A century later, can poetry help us make sense of the First World War’s horrors?
9 minutes
video
Language and linguistics
The little Peruvian guide to public speaking that conjures up a grandiose world
7 minutes
video
Life stages
What Michelangelo’s late-in-life works reveal about his genius – and his humanness
13 minutes