Jean Kilbourne

Sex sells. What sells even more? Insecurity. Multi-billion dollar industries saturate our lives with images of unattainable beauty, exporting body hatred from New York to Beirut to Tokyo. Their target? Women, and increasingly men and children. "The Illusionists" turns the mirror on media, exposing the absurd, sometimes humorous, and shocking images that seek to enslave us.

The documentary focuses on images of women in advertising, in particular on gender stereotypes, the effects of advertising on women's self-image and the objectification of women's bodies.

Jean Kilbourne's pioneering work helped develop and popularize the study of gender representation in advertising. Her award-winning Killing us Softly films have influenced millions of college and high school students across two generations and on an international scale. In this important new film, Kilbourne reviews if and how the image of women in advertising has changed over the last 20 years. With wit and warmth, Kilbourne uses over 160 ads and TV commercials to critique advertising's image of women. By fostering creative and productive dialogue, she invites viewers to look at familiar images in a new way, that moves and empowers them to take action.

This follow-up to Jean Kilbourne's award-winning 1979 documentary, KILLING US SOFTLY, further probes the harmful effects of stereotypical and sexist images in advertising. Kilbourne conducts a lecture within the film, displaying still images of women, men, children, and violent crime via a slide projector. By emphasizing the dehumanization of women by television's body-image obsession, she teaches viewers how America is taught to categorize women primarily as sex objects.

Taking advertisements from magazines, newspapers, album covers and shop front windows, KILLING US SOFTLY presents specific examples of the ways in which advertisements reinforce stereotypes, affect our self-image and how we relate to each other, our concepts of success and worth, love and sexuality, popularity and normality. Using an intriguing mixture of statistics, humor, insight and outrage, Jean Kilbourne questions how far the use and abuse of women in advertising is connected to the sexual exploitation of women at large and the increasing incidence of child abuse.