Deepfake porn documentary explores its 'life-shattering' impact

 
The director of a documentary about the impact of deepfake porn has said she hopes her film will help people understand the immeasurable trauma it causes.

Rosie Morris's film, My Blonde GF, is about what happened to writer Helen Mort when she found out photos of her face had appeared on deepfake images on a porn site.A deepfake image is one where the face of one person is digitally added to the body of another.

Helen thinks the pictures of her could have come from an old Facebook account, and professional shots of her in the public domain.
In the film, we see her thumbing through photos of herself aged from 19 to 32, smiling at weddings, family occasions and when she was pregnant.
These are the images which were then digitally edited onto photos of women in sexually explicit and violent scenes.

"I needed to see the pictures for myself," she says, speaking straight to the camera. It makes the audience feel part of an uncomfortable conversation.
"There's a woman, she's sitting on the edge of the bed, she's got my face but it's not my mouth, she's [doing a sexual act]… the woman's skin is a lot more tanned than mine would be, and this woman has exactly my tattoo.

"She's looking at some text... an invitation to humiliate the person in the picture, which is me."
In the text, Helen is described as "My blonde GF", short for girlfriend, which becomes the title of the documentary.

Morris wanted to explore the impact the images had on Helen, including terrifying, graphic recurring nightmares and paranoia.
Helen says she often feels as if "people on the street somehow knew about the pictures, and they knew this horrible secret about me, which suddenly felt like my horrible secret".

This isn't the first time she has spoken about this though, and there have been other documentaries on deepfake porn, so how is Morris's film different?
"My film doesn't pay any attention to the perpetrator - I'm not interested in the headspace of the person that did it," the director says. "My main goal was I want you to walk alongside Helen this story.

"You are with her at every stage - when I met her she was still processing it, and trying to work it out. So the only way to get you to really feel it, is if you're alongside her the whole time.

"What struck me when I met Helen was that you can sexually violate somebody without coming into any physical contact with them.
"That's the thing that motivated me; I think that's I think that's the thing that shocked me most."