Fake News Fairytale
2018 · 14m · United Kingdom
Directed by Kate Stonehill
Genres: documentary
Tones: contemplative, dark
In 2016, teenagers in the economically depressed Macedonian town of Veles discovered a digital gold rush: fabricating fake news for American audiences — and some of them now reckon with what they unleashed.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the moralizing takedown of teen misinformation—Stonehill refuses to play that game, instead letting Veles kids articulate their own reckoning with complicity and economic desperation, which is infinitely messier and weirder than the consensus hot-take would allow.
A formally precise work of participatory documentary that locates itself in the lineage of ethical witness-cinema, with Stonehill's restraint in the edit—letting testimony breathe, resisting the urge to sensationalize—functioning as the film's moral argument.
The singular choice here is structural: Stonehill lets the perpetrators speak first and without interruption, a decision that reframes the entire moral axis of the story and forces viewers to sit with discomfort rather than judgment—it's what transforms this from a news story into cinema.