Sexy Inc. Our Children Under Influence
2007 · 35m · Canada
Directed by Sophie Bissonnette
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
Psychologists, teachers, and school nurses examine how advertising and media increasingly sexualize childhood and target ever-younger audiences. The documentary considers harmful effects on young people and proposes ways to resist the eroticization of children and sexist imagery.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's a cleanly argued PSA dressed up as documentary—exactly the kind of consensus-friendly cultural critique that makes you feel smart without actually disturbing anything. Pass.
Bissonnette's essay-documentary form sits deliberately in the lineage of agitprop cinema, and the rigor with which she builds her argument through expert testimony and visual culture analysis earns its pedagogical weight—this is documentary as formal persuasion.
The decision to let psychologists and educators speak *over* the advertising imagery rather than against it creates a strange, unsettling friction that most advocacy docs avoid; it's a small structural choice that actually makes the manipulation visible instead of just describing it.