Believing is Seeing
2022 · 10m · New Zealand
Directed by Sophie Black
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, provocative
A spike in tic disorders among teenagers prompts a sociologist to ask whether social media can spread illness itself.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The premise wants to be provocative—social contagion via algorithm—but it settles into earnest sociology when it should be asking whether the question itself is a symptom of our need to blame the medium. Frustratingly reasonable when it could've been genuinely unsettling.
Black positions this work within the lineage of observational documentary that interrogates how we construct epidemiological narratives, and the formal restraint—letting the contradiction between causation and correlation breathe—honors that tradition with real intellectual rigor.
The decision to let teenagers and researchers talk past each other rather than synthesize their perspectives is the film's spine; that structural choice does the real work of suggesting how differently we see the same phenomenon depending on where we stand.