Marc Isaacs’s Synthetic Sincerity concerns subject matter for which a spoiler warning is probably itself already a spoiler. But this is the kind of double bind that Isaacs’s approach to documentary produces. So be it. Here be the spoilers.
Isaacs likes the grey area between documentary and fiction. That isn’t new. But with Synthetic Sincerity, he does enter new terrain: the realm of Artificial Intelligence.
First of all, what a wonderful title! I imagine IDFA’s new media programme DocLab will be envious, as it covers – and challenges – so much of what the new media field has been exploring in the documentary genre.
In Isaacs’s film, ‘Synthetic Sincerity’ is the name of a research laboratory belonging to the ‘University of Southern England’ that uses the slogan ‘Where Data Learns To Be Human’. Isaacs is approached not by one of its employees, but by its AI spokesperson who announces, on behalf of the institute’s leading expert: “Professor Song and I would like to make you an offer.”
What comes next is a spoiler, because the film is obviously playing with levels of reality, but I consider it a minor one: if you know anything about England, AI or cinema, these first scenes will probably already have tipped you off that this whole set-up is fake – or ‘fictional’.
There is no such thing as the ‘University of Southern England’ and neither do the premises Isaacs visits seem very convincing. Also, it would be highly unlikely for an academic institute to use such a provocative slogan (‘Where Data Learns To Be Human’), and display it so prominently. And if you know your recent arthouse cinema, you may also recognise the lab’s AI spokesperson as Ilinca Manolache, lead actor of Radu Jude’s Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World (2023).
The film’s ‘fictional’ status is something the documentary itself playfully admits towards the end, and which most viewers will probably have registered early on. About a fictitious institute doing made-up research into creating a more ‘sincere’ AI. Isaacs himself considers it ‘the third documentary-fiction hybrid film of the trilogy’, following his The Filmmaker’s House (2021) and This Blessed Plot (2023).
The premise is this: the Synthetic Sincerity Lab wants to use Isaacs’s previous documentaries – specifically his filming of people – to train their AI, in exchange for allowing him to document the process. Isaacs agrees, and we get to see fragments from his earlier documentaries All White in Barking (2008), Calais: The Last Border (2003), Lift (2001), Men of the City (2010), Outside the Court (2009) and The Road – A Story of Life and Death (2013) during the process.
The resulting film entertains with its interplay between the real and the artificial. When the SS (I suppose the acronym is unintentional) employees watch some of Isaacs’s clips, they are immediately drawn into the narrative (instead of focusing on the facial and postural details they’re supposed to be researching) – yet they respond in terms of fiction. One analyses the logic of the ‘drama’, while another compares it to Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket.
There are scenes where a new subject, Uyghur restaurant owner Ablikim Rahman, is being scanned and asked to perform certain emotions – raising obvious questions about the authenticity claims of such research. And even though she’s a fantastic actor, Manolache’s jerky head movements and posture changes, intended to suggest Generative AI, all feel a bit too studied and, well, not quite ‘synthetic’ enough: the human inevitably, irrepressibly shines through.
Isaacs has a warm and calming personality, and a conversational approach to interviewing which keeps the film – with its accessible reportage aesthetic – gliding along pleasantly, while touching upon a fairly large number of issues related to the current AI boom (or, by the time you read this, perhaps bust). I suspect that the film will be an effective mental prod and conversation starter for those relatively new to the subject matter and its muddier sides.
Intellectually, however, Synthetic Sincerity does not delve very deeply. What ‘sincerity’ is or could be – or could be defined as for AI purposes – is never seriously discussed, nor are the ethics of using real people as training data or of creating convincingly realistic AI content. And the question of ‘what is documentary, what is scripted’, which intentionally hovers over the entire film, almost solely concerns the behaviour of the real people on screen – not the delineation between reality and AI.
And so I feel less challenged to question whether something is real or AI – and what that difference entails – and, more, whether any of the real people I see on screen are doing or saying anything authentic and unscripted on camera. Is that SS employee really suddenly video-calling from Qatar because her family had to flee Israeli bombing in Lebanon, for example? Or is she deliberately holding her phone’s camera at such a low angle only to show the nondescript white ceiling, and in fact she’s still in ‘Southern England’?
Now, I like hybrids. But this is the kind of untethered hybridity which, like an oil spill, ends up undermining all documentary credibility. Which just serves as a reminder that people can do that very well themselves – we don’t need AI to do it for us.
But I do feel safe in assuming that Ablikim Rahman is truly telling his own story through his AI avatar – an avatar which, I’m equally sure, is simply him with some added digital artefacts. The idea in the film being that this avatar can talk about things which he, as a Uyghur fleeing the Chinese dictatorship, cannot. This is using AI to give “voice to the voiceless”, as one politically motivated SS employee puts it. It’s an interesting notion – and controversial, given the flood of fake AI testimonials – made all the more poignant because it actually is this Uyghur man himself (Isaacs’s real-life neighbour, it turns out) who dares speak his own, biological mind.
United Kingdom, 2025, 71 minutes
Director Marc Isaacs
Production Sincerity Films
Producer Marc Isaacs
International sales Samy Pollet-Villard (Andana Films)
Script Adam Ganz
Cinematography Marc Isaacs
Editing Marc Isaacs, David Charap
Sound design Dan Weinberg
Sound Sarah Gonzalez Centeno
Music Yahli Lev
With Lynn El-Safah, Ablikim Rahman, Marc Isaacs
