Sexy Inc. Our Children Under Influence (Youth Version)
2007 · 26m · Canada
Directed by Sophie Bissonnette
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, provocative
In a youth-oriented version of the same investigation, experts examine how sexualized marketing reaches children earlier and shapes girls' identities through degrading stereotypes. It also explores confusion between pornography and sexual relationships online, and suggests responses to hypersexualized media culture.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Bissonnette's doing the predictable advocacy doc thing here—expert testimony, concerned framings, the whole apparatus of 'media literacy as moral hygiene'—which is exactly why it doesn't subvert anything. The youth angle just softens what could've been genuinely unsettling.
A formally disciplined essay that situates itself squarely in the investigative documentary tradition while refusing easy resolution; the architecture of expert testimony against lived experience creates real argumentative tension, and you feel the care in how it navigates the pedagogical stakes.
The decision to center youth perspective rather than talk *at* them reframes the entire inquiry—suddenly it's not about protection rhetoric but recognition of sophistication and confusion happening simultaneously, which is the one move that makes the film's argument actually land.