Caught in the Net

Vít Klusák & Barbora Chalupová : 2020
V síti

A documentary on what can happen to young girls when left at the mercy of the uncontrollable virtual world. Everyone knows something like this is happening. But this is the only experiment to fully demonstrate what excessive openness on the internet means. Hiring three actresses who are over 18 but who look much younger, the filmmaking couple created fake profiles of 12-year-old girls on Facebook and other platforms. The production team built an actual film set consisting of three young teenage girls' rooms, complete with plush toys, pink bedsheets and posters. The actresses, pretending to be these prepubescent girls then communicated with strangers who approached them based on their fake accounts. They attracted dozens of men in the first ten days, then hundreds, and finally thousands. The numbers of those looking for sexual satisfaction from the interactions are shocking. Most of the middle-aged men stopped at nothing to lure the supposed children into sending them photos or videos. The production doctored pictures of the girls with nude images of models, and then when an actress declined to take her clothes off in a live chat, the man would threaten to share the pics online. After weeks of online communication, there was even a personal meeting, and hidden cameras and microphones, along with undercover bodyguards, were placed in a Prague patisserie. A social experiment that turns into an interventionist documentary, the materials from which have been forwarded to the police who are starting official investigations. Barbora Chalupová and Vít Klusák's film won the Best Film award when it premiered in the Czech Competition section at Prague One World International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival 2020.

Caught in the Net – trailer (cineuropa)