Marc Isaacs’ latest feature Synthetic Sincerity (sold by Andana and opening Krakow FF 2026) has an unlikely main protagonist: Ablikim Rahman, proprietor of a very popular local Uyghur restaurant in North London.
“He owns the restaurant at the corner of my road. I’ve been eating there and getting acquainted with him for some time. I thought he’d be great in the film because he has such a good face,” Isaacs notes.
In the film, Rahman becomes a guinea pig for some very sophisticated AI experiments, allowing researchers to map his endlessly expressive face, and to chart his gestures and movements in the minutest of digital detail.
The Synthetic Sincerity lab, which is doing the work on him, is a department at a university in the south of England. In real life, it doesn’t actually exist, but the Chinese professor who we see run it, Yuanchen Wang, is a real-life academic and AI expert, and several of his actual PHD students appear in the film.
Isaacs came across the professor through his screenwriter, Adam Ganz.
Romanian actress Illinca Manolache, best-known for her work with Radu Jude, plays the AI avatar who is continually telling Isaacs off. Everything she says is pre-scripted, generated by AI.
“I met her in Romania. I filmed data of her – her different moods and in different lighting. Then I put that through the AI system and it produced a template of her.”
In his own playful way, Isaacs is asking some very challenging questions about our evolving relationship with AI, and where reality now begins and ends.
“I love humour in films and there is something absurd about the world we are living in…and it comes quite naturally to me,” the director observes of the comic elements. “I want the film to be both humorous and serious at the same time.”
Ask Isaacs whether he regards AI as a valuable filmmaking tool or as something sinister and dehumanising, and he deflects the question.
“It’s not AI that is the problem. It is power – who is going to use it, how they are going to use it, and to what ends? As a filmmaker, that is really interesting to start to explore. I think it opens up really interesting creative possibilities, also ones that are totally unpredictable in terms of where we are heading. It is already used in warfare and it’s terrifying but, at the same time, as a creative tool, I don’t feel anxious about it.”
Isaacs is clearly fascinated by his subject in philosophical terms too. Humans, he points out, have always identified with make-believe characters. “When we read a novel, we suspend our disbelief, whether it’s Harry Potter or something else. I think we do that in fiction, and in film as well.”
Synthetic Sincerity is a hybrid work with scripted elements, but also has scenes closer to traditional documentary. Isaacs teaches filmmaking at UCL. One of his Lebanese former students, Lynn El-Safah, features in the film as an AI researcher – and footage showing her with her grandmother, who had to leave Beirut for Qatar because of Israeli attacks, isn’t constructed.
“90% of it is just pretty straight documentary, and there is a small element of dialogue that is put in afterwards.”
The scientist Yuanchen Wang proved a surprisingly self-effacing, genial figure, and was very willing to play along with Isaacs’ self-reflexive games.
“He’s quite a remarkable man. He’s really into AI but he wants it to be an open access, democratic tool, and so he is really interested in how artists might want to use it. He was really intrigued by what we were doing,” Isaacs notes of a character very different from the sinister men in white coats so often depicted in movies set in research labs. “In real life, he is like…he appears on camera, a very nice, energetic, engaged person and I think he really enjoyed the process of discovering how a film is put together.”
At one stage, the head of the fictional university becomes worried that the AI experiments with the Uyghur subject may upset the Chinese students. “I work at UCL and 40% of their income is from Chinese or international students. They have to be really careful. It’s a delicate situation…students are customers now,” he says of how university administrators try very hard to keep their internationals students happy.
The director adds that he can picture a world where HR executives “will be [AI] avatars, doing the hiring and firing. There are so many AI systems in institutions that are being developed and they’re so dehumanising. When you employ people at university, you’re literally ticking off attributes according to some pre-conceived grid that allows no sense of personal human instinct about whether that person might be good in the department, and all the stuff that can’t be measured.”
Synthetic Society was made on a modest budget, in this case largely funded by Isaacs taking on some extra teaching work.
“I made this film for £8,000. There is something about the independence that gives you. Also, if you can set it up in a very small-scale way, you can get on and do it. You don’t have to wait around for months or years for the funding, which may or may not happen. That tends to kill any momentum you may have going.”
Isaacs realises the film is bound to provoke debate about the ethics and aesthetics of AI.
“Have we entered a time where the death of the camera is approaching? AI is almost the death of representation because it’s a representation of nothing really…I don’t know where it is all going to lead. I think broadcasters have a hell of a job to keep up because it is all so unregulated,’ he concludes.
A version of this article was first published for IDFA 2025.
