In 2020, poet, author and academic Helen Mort made a deeply troubling discovery. A friend alerted her to the fact that there were explicit photos of her on a porn site. Someone had stolen her images from social media and had used deepfake technology to superimpose her face onto bodies of other women.
Rosie Morris’s new documentary My Blonde GF (a UK premiere at Sheffield Doc Fest this weekend) looks at how Mort has dealt with an incident that “just falls into a hole in the law.” Through deepfakes, it is possible to sexually “violate” someone without coming into direct contact with them. If a new online safety bill is passed, it will make the distribution of deepfakes without consent illegal. However, victims currently have no redress against online image based abuse.
“With this film, the creative approach is completely in response to the ethical challenges,” Morris says of her approach to telling Helen’s story.
One resolution was made by the filmmakers right at the outset. “We knew that we would never show the images. That was just a given from the beginning. It was never a question. I knew immediately that we didn’t need to see the images. We needed to see Helen seeing the images.”
The incident gave Helen recurring nightmares. It put a huge cloud over her life. She was a young mother raising a child – and now this loomed over her during every moment of her day to day existence.
“This experience had completely infiltrated her personal life, her personal space. It’s there is her bedroom. It is at her dressing table,” Morris explains why she shows Helen in her home. “It [the experience] is there all the time and I wanted that sense of claustrophobia.”
At film school, Morris made the short doc Heart Eyes and a World, about the objectification of 15-year-old girls through selfies and social media. She sees connections between the two films. “It’s this idea of what are we participating in when we use these mediums – when we join Facebook, what are we participating in that we didn’t know about?”
Morris had read about the surge in revenge porn and the use of deepfake pictures during lockdown. It was in this period that she came across Helen’s story.
“I sent Helen a message on Twitter and I sent her my previous film. She got straight back to me and we spoke,” Morris explains how she made initial contact with her subject.
The film was produced by Tyke Films and funded by BFI Doc Society, through the OKRE Fund with the support of Guardian Documentaries. After Sheffield, it will be posted on the Guardian website where it is likely to reach a huge number of viewers.
Morris doesn’t highlight Mort’s status as one of the UK’s most respected and successful young poets, although it is revealed that she is a writer. “I wanted you to walk alongside Helen in this experience and be in the emotional space with her. Everything we did was about about that. We didn’t go into much that is factual…I was never interested in the perpetrator at all. And I didn’t want people to think that it was because she had a public profile that this happened because it isn’t that.”
Morris repeats that My Blonde GF is intended to put the viewer “in Helen’s headspace.”
This may be a deeply personal portrait of its subject but Morris hopes it will make viewers realise how traumatic it is to have your image manipulated and abused.
The documentary ends with a very disturbing statistic, that 96% of deepfakes are non-consensual porn featuring women.
“I don’t think people will walk away from this film saying ‘come on, they [the pictures] weren’t real. It is no big deal.’ I want to bring a sense of understanding about the sheer impact of something like this. I do want the film to draw attention to the issue because it is something we all need to listen to.”
Morris acknowledges that satirists and artists can use deepfakes in inventive and playful fashion. There have been images and videos of everyone from Tom Cruise to the Pope that have achieved cult status online.
“Some artists work with it [deepfake technology] brilliantly. They’re using it to ask questions about the truth,” Morris notes but she refers back to the damning statistics about the misogynistic depiction of women. She also reflects on how images can no longer be trusted.
“I’ve always taken photographs since I was about 8 years old. I’ve always looked back at them. I love photographs and what they do. There is no separation between the photograph and your memory…they do something amazing with time and memory,” Morris reflects, but she expresses her dismay at the idea that “the moment in time which you captured, which is such a pure thing” can be “reappropriated” through technology and its meaning completely changed. “It’s scary, isn’t it? What happened with Helen is not high tech in the way that those deepfake videos are. This is not an expert doing it. This is what people are able to do from their bedroom.”
While making the documentary, Morris and her collaborators were able to draw on the expertise of Dr Afroditi Pina, a reader in Forensic Psychology who provided mental health and research expertise from a psychological perspective.
On the eve of the Sheffield premiere, the director is very heartened by her subject’s response to the documentary. “I would describe Helen as extraordinary and defiant. She has been that the whole way through. She has told me that she found making the film cathartic. The best thing about this whole process for me is her saying that somehow it has transformed the experience for her. In your wildest dreams as a documentary maker, that is what you want to happen.”
