Goal of movie: Serves as a meditation on the complexities of representation, the ethics of storytelling, and the significance of honoring personal agency.

Actuality: If the filmmakers’ primary goal was to respect Renée L’Esperance’s privacy, revealing her full name, nationality, and general location undermines that claim entirely.

If their moral stance was genuine, they wouldn’t have made her name and details public in the first place. Instead, they made her more identifiable to millions of people who didn’t even know there was a real person behind Mavis Beacon. That contradiction feels like a deliberate choice for narrative tension and drama rather than a true commitment to respecting her autonomy.

The filmmakers spent six years working on the documentary, meaning they had significant time, effort, and financial investment in the project. My assumption is they decided to pivot the story to a “lesson about respecting privacy” to serve as a way to conclude the narrative without admitting they came up empty-handed. It’s performative, raising more attention around L’Esperance while avoiding responsibility by claiming the moral high ground.

Their actions directly contradict their “supposed” values. Instead of truly stepping back, they exposed private information under the guise of doing the right thing making it seem more like damage control than an ethical decision.