The Illusionists is an English language, feature-length documentary about the manipulation and exploitation of women’s insecurities about their bodies – for profit.

From Los Angeles to Tokyo, the sale of half a trillion dollars worth of products is dependent upon manipulating women’s fears and anxieties about their appearance. Through advertising and mass media, multibillion-dollar industries (most notably cosmetics, fashion, dieting, and cosmetic surgery) saturate our lives with images of idealized, unattainable beauty, purposefully exacerbating women’s insecurities, and then profiting from them, through the sale of a plethora of products and treatments.

The obsession over the pursuit of fairness, youth, and thinness for women – and the exaltation of those qualities – ultimately reveal a deep rooted fear in the power of confident, mature women and is one of the most effective weapons used by the patriarchal system to stifle women’s advancement and thus maintain the status quo.

The documentary will explore these themes through the testimonies of sociologists, historians, scientists, authors, and regular women, on four different continents: North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.