Sometimes it seems that the time has come for certain subjects. As if documentaries about them just have to be made. Another Body, the feature debut from directors Sophie Compton and Reuben Hamlyn, is about young women searching for the creator of deepfake porn videos that use their likenesses.
It arrives in IDFA’s Competition for Youth Documentary on the heels of a much-publicised court case in the Netherlands, in which such a creator was convicted, having originally been tracked down not by the police but by his victim, Dutch TV presenter Welmoed Sijtsma, who discovered his identity during an investigatory documentary series. Meanwhile, The Guardian has just released its own documentary short on the subject.
For those who aren’t up to date with the term ‘deepfake’ and its implications, it has become relatively easy to digitally superimpose someone’s facial likeness onto a video of someone else. If you possess video material of your victim, say a YouTube video, or even enough still pictures (Compton and Hamlyn’s documentary mentions 150, scraped from the victim’s Facebook and Instagram accounts), the deepfake programs can create a digital mask of your victim’s face to cover the original – seamlessly following head movements and facial expressions.
It has happened to celebrities, who find themselves endorsing products they never signed up for (or posthumously opening IDFA’s DocLab 2019), it happens in politics, such as when a Russian deepfake video made Ukrainian President Zelensky appear to be telling Ukrainians to surrender, but most of all, and unsurprisingly, it happens in porn.
I say unsurprisingly, because pornography has proven time and again to be a driver of technical innovation, for better or worse. But let’s be clear: there are two steps here. The first is the creation of deepfake porn. It is not hard to imagine, for example, someone wanting to create a deepfake fantasy of themselves having sex with a famous beauty, by superimposing faces onto an existing video. If the technology exists – and it already does, and will only become easier to use and more widely available – people will start experimenting with it. And that, in itself, is innocent enough.
But the second step, and the real issue here, is sharing it online. This is where nonconsensual deepfake porn videos become similar to revenge porn. Deepfake revenge porn. Another Body points to famous female victims like Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Greta Thunberg – powerful women who have drawn the ire of online misogynists. “The disciplinary effect of those deepfakes is: you shouldn’t be successful, you shouldn’t go into journalism, you shouldn’t go into politics,” says legal scholar Mary Anne Franks in Another Body.
And when Franks says ‘you’, she means ‘women’. Because it’s disproportionately women who are the victims here. Deepfake, potentially a playful tool for the fulfilment of private fantasies, alongside serious artistic and even therapeutic uses, has been massively weaponised against women who, in the eyes of misogynistic online communities, have somehow wronged men by becoming too powerful or, as seems to be the case in Another Body, by simply breaking off a friendship.
Another Body makes very clear how devastating the effects can be for the individual targeted. How, as the filmmakers write in the press notes, ‘[t]hese videos are fake, but their impacts are all too real’. The main character, an American college student named Taylor Klein, has OCD and has always been very concerned about what people think of her. She has always been a diligent student, a ‘nerd’ as she calls herself, and very focused on her career. But now that her nemesis – most likely a spurned friend, as she discovers during the filming of the video diaries that form the backbone of this documentary – has posted the deepfake porn videos of her on Pornhub and elsewhere, adding her name, hometown and school, she feels unsafe. She has become quiet, suspicious. Suddenly, the first hits on Google for her name no longer point to the academic qualifications she has worked so hard for, but to porn videos – videos that, to be clear, are not easily recognisable as fakes.
Who among her friends and fellow students already knows? People she confides in are dismissive and doubt the suspected friend is responsible. It is she, not he, who loses social contacts as a result. And since whoever posted the deepfakes added a request, seemingly in her name, to contact her directly online, she has been receiving sexual and aggressive texts from unknown men on her social media accounts. With the information on Pornhub, someone could easily find her address. Especially in the beginning, when Klein had no idea who might be behind the uploads, it was a frightening thought to be someone’s target. It made her withdraw socially. Her world, offline and online, gradually got smaller. She was effectively silenced. Which seems to be precisely the general intention of people, men, who post such videos.
I say ‘Klein’, but ‘Taylor Klein’ is not her real name. The only way she could participate in this documentary, she explains, was anonymously. That is why we are also not seeing her real face. In a clever twist, the same deepfake technology that has haunted her, is now helping her hide her identity (with the help of an actor’s digital likeness); just as the online worlds she enters, with their photos of other victims and porn clips, have been recreated for this documentary with actors and consenting adult performers, and any recognisable surroundings have been recreated as CG animation. It’s an approach which raises interesting questions about documentary representation, without, in my opinion, undermining the credibility of the central message of Another Body, which won the Special Jury Award for Innovation in Storytelling at SXSW. Plus, this approach has the added benefit of showing just how convincing the technology has become. Klein’s deepfake face in this documentary is almost perfect – I don’t think I would have noticed it, if the documentary hadn’t pointed out the manipulation.
Which also highlights the difficult issue of anonymity online. The creators of these deepfakes hide their computer’s IP address (by which they could have been identified) behind a VPN – the same technology we are encouraged to use to protect ourselves from hackers. And the same deepfake technology that has been weaponised against her is also protecting Klein in this documentary.
So, what’s the answer? Another Body follows the basic structure of an activist documentary: first make it personal (with Taylor Klein), then widen the scope (with background information from experts and other victims), and then suggest a way forward. It’s a call to action against IBSA (Image Based Sexual Abuse), for which the film’s website points to the #MyImageMyChoice campaign, co-founded by the documentary’s directors.
Because it’s not enough for individuals to file charges. Most American states have no laws against nonconsensual deepfake porn. Many cops and judges still don’t even know it exists. Klein gets further than most, a lawyer tells her, when the police actually call the person she suspects – to scare him off, but apparently without the means or intent to prosecute. This may mean he won’t try the same thing again with Klein, but he isn’t punished either, and could easily continue to terrorise others.
Klein’s best way forward turns out to be the Sisterhood. She contacts one, then others, who have also been victims of deepfake porn videos from the same anonymous online account she has identified as their source. Women she recognised personally and who all know the same suspected creator. She also contacts a famous ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response)-streamer who is among the victims, together with other online practitioners of ASMR (who create soothing sounds many people react to).
It is by joining forces and no longer having to go it alone, that Klein regains her strength. So much so that she ends up telling her story to the recently established White House Task Force on Online Abuse, whose report is forthcoming. Meanwhile, popular ASMR-streamer Gibi, backed by Klein’s research, dares to speak out online, using her platform and reach (much like Sijtsma) and prompting grateful responses from other victims who finally feel heard. Eventually, Gibi even takes the main suspect to court.
Another Body can sometimes go a little overboard with suspenseful music, CG animation and added archival footage of storms and attacks, but its thriller-like approach is gripping and emotional, and I would certainly urge schools to consider showing it as a way of getting the issue out into the open. Because deepfake porn is not going away, and as this documentary shows, only by speaking out do the Sisterhood and their allies have any chance of countering its devastating effects.
United States, 2023, 80 minutes
Director Sophie Compton and Reuben Hamlyn
Production Willa Productions, Impact Partners
Producers Elizabeth Woodward, Sophie Compton and Reuben Hamlyn
International sales 30 West
Script Sophie Compton, Reuben Hamlyn and Isabel Freeman
Cinematography Nausheen Dadabhoy
Editing Isabel Freeman and Rabab Haj Yahya
Sound design Gisela Fullà Silvestre
Music Holland Andrews
