Isaacs' 'Synthetic Sincerity' Invents AI Lab to Probe
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- Marc Isaacs' new film 'Synthetic Sincerity' invents a fictitious 'University of Southern England' that supposedly licensed his quarter-century body of work to an AI lab to harvest authentic human emotions for creating AI characters
- Ablikim Rahman, owner of Uyghur restaurant Etles near Isaacs' London home, appears in the film being photographed and turned into an AI avatar — his first film appearance, which he hasn't yet seen
- Ilinca Manolache plays the AI avatar who flatters, provokes and upbraids Isaacs on screen; she previously used an AI filter to portray an Andrew Tate-style influencer in Radu Jude's 'Do Not Expect Too Much From the End of the World' and is currently filming Martin Scorsese's 'What Happens at Night' alongside Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence
- The 70-minute film tackles AI, the democratisation of images, Israel's bombing of Lebanon, Uyghur displacement and pro-China censorship in UK universities, in Isaacs' customary deadpan style
- Isaacs and writer Adam Ganz criticised mainstream documentary, with Ganz declaring 'ordinary people are being erased' and both citing Netflix's 'Beckham' as an example of celebrity-driven 'docbusters' that have replaced the BBC/Channel 4 tradition of diverse British lives
- Isaacs admitted to running his next project's initial script ideas past ChatGPT; Ganz's texted reply was 'Fuck off'
Why it matters: Isaacs' hybrid approach — wilful fabrication to interrogate truth — directly challenges a documentary industry that Ganz says has abandoned ordinary British lives for celebrity spectacle, exemplified by Netflix's 'Beckham'. By turning his own 25-year archive into raw material for a fictional AI lab, the 70-minute film stakes out an aesthetic position: if AI can mimic human emotion, the question of what 'authentic' documentary even means becomes a practical problem for the next generation of filmmakers trying to represent ordinary lives.
