A good documentary is as much an act of enlightenment as it is a call to arms. At best, it is an instrument of change that encapsulates a moment in time so astutely that it captures the urgency and anger needed to turn the tide.
Such is the case with Your Attention Please, the startling and emotionally harrowing film by Sara Robin. This is a smartly crafted and deeply humane documentary that treats its impossibly dark material with elegance and maturity. In lesser hands, it could have resulted in an exploitative piece of hysteria. Instead, Robins weaves a compelling argument for sanity at a time when we're short on it.
The narrative builds in stages, effectively constructing a clear path from social media communities to the commodification of surveillance by AI companies. At the heart of the story are two brave women, Kristin Bride and Trisha Prabhu.
Bride tells us how her son took his own life after relentless and horrific online bullying by classmates. Robins doesn't shy away from the harsh reality, nor does the film use euphemisms or platitudes to speak about real-world consequences this kind of hate brings. Yet the film refuses to wallow in other people's misery. Instead, it presents the facts, like the heart-wrenching account of Bride finding her son dead, through delicately animated sequences that prove more than enough.
Robin's work is a tremendous high-wire act. Too much of any one thing, and she risks the film collapsing into predatory melodrama. Too little, and it robs the truth of power. On a purely technical level, I can't praise Your Attention Please enough for how emotionally honest it is with the telling.
The second part of the film centers on Prabhu and the broader world of our addiction to the internet. At first, it feels as if Your Attention Please will fall for the nostalgia trap of romanticising the past with an elaborate foreword about the time before the smartphone. But, as with most things in the film, this too proves an unfounded concern. There is a necessity for the reminder. A mere generation later, we can barely remember the simplicity and freedom of a disconnected world, and that has done something to our collective psyche.
I'm part of the last wave of people who grew up without a constant internet connection. I remember how it felt to catch up on news months later or arrange plans where you had to trust others to arrive at a specific time and place. As an autistic person, certain things are far more accessible today, yet I'm struck by how hard it hit me to see just how much we've given up for the sake of convenience.
Prabhu, a digital-safety advocate and creator of the anti-cyberbullying technology ReThink, works to create a semblance of that world gone by. As her and Bride's stories intertwine, Your Attention Please reveals itself as a powerful mosaic of our interconnected digital life. Every part feeds another, creating an Ouroboros that cannot sustain itself.
A lesser film would settle for panic and hysteria, and Your Attention Please feels almost suffocating at times. We go from toothless advocacy groups to broken patriarchal hearings, where disassociated political powers ignore victims for the sake of their own bank accounts. In just a few short years, things go from bad to worse, as the rot of AI seeps into the foundations of our society.
Despite all of this, Your Attention Please refuses to succumb to miserabilism. It presents cogent arguments for how things can and should be. Grassroots movements show a promise of a better tomorrow. There's a sense that while the past won't return, we don't have to accept the present dystopia.
It is not an all-encompassing solution, nor does Your Attention Please even pretend to be one. We have only begun to grasp the devastation that social media has caused. It will take even longer to carve a bigger picture. But this is a primer, a rallying cry for humanity. It is an angry and outspoken plea for everyone to stop and look around before it's too late.
Your Attention Please is one of the most vitally important films of the decade. I just hope we realize it sooner rather than later.
