Director Vít Klusák: "In the documentary In the Net, we filmed the enormous disgusting things that children can encounter on the Internet"
What do you think about the success of the documentary In the Net?
I remember the moment when we sat down with the executive producer Pavla Klimešová about a fortnight before the premiere and worked out exactly what the cinema release would look like. At that time, we even started betting on whether we would break the 100,000 viewers mark with the documentary. Whether it was even possible for a documentary of this type to do that.
Although, cinema release is not the Olympics and it's not about breaking records like that, because what's important is that the audience is affected by the film or documentary and feels the need to discuss it. Despite all this, we wondered if we would jump over the imaginary 100,000. We thought it would be nice if we could do it within six months. Then we sat on our asses. After the first weekend, we had 115,000 people. We were very happy about that.
There was a reward for your hard work?
You're right. It's a long run. You spend two to two and a half years on a feature documentary by the time it premieres, and the whole time you don't know if it's going to resonate. So when you get that kind of strong positive feedback, it's very gratifying.
At the same time, you can definitely say that you've fulfilled the expectation that the audience should be affected by the documentary...
That's even more important to us. We've managed to reach places that a regular documentary doesn't normally go. It's been done by everybody. Since my colleague Chalupova and I appear in the film, I was getting feedback right on the street. I'm also glad that the documentary reached people who don't normally watch documentaries.
Is it true that the response would have been even greater if it weren't for the coronavirus?
It completely killed it at one point. At the time the government shut down everything (including cinemas), we were getting around 30,000 viewers a day. Multiplexes were playing us eight or ten times a day. But I interpreted it as a lesson in humility in my working mind, because it really was a ride. People from our distribution company, who are very sober in their opinions, said that if the coronavirus hadn't come along, V síti would have been one of the few Czech films that could have hit the million-dollar mark. To date, we have about 530,000 viewers.
Where did the initial idea to create a documentary with such content come from?
The very first impulse came from the people at O2's Smart School project, which is dedicated to educating young people about how to behave responsibly online. Palacký University has one such project (E-Safety). At the time we were approached by O2, they had just submitted a survey involving 27,000 children. From this research, disturbing data emerged about the increasing number of children being abused on the Internet. The O2 wanted to see some controversy and a viral video come out of this.
The director who was tasked with this was on holiday and staying in a mountain hut where, coincidentally, I had earlier filmed an episode of Yes, Boss with Zdenek Pohlreich. The owner of the mountain hut, after a discussion with the director in question, referred to me that she had a very good experience with me. I heard back from O2 on that account. It was only then that I started thinking about the overall concept of the then still viral video.
How did you arrive at the final form?
I knew I had to go down a certain crystalline path. It couldn't be too complicated. So I figured we'd make the endangered child. How else do you show people in the most authentic way what can happen to a child in a nursery?
Have you worked with Bara Chalupova before?
I approached her to have a girly element to it, and Bára has done a lot of work on the darknet, so she knows the dark corners of the internet. Together we went to the O2, where they presented us with all the stats and their plan. We then got down to our own research, making a fake profile on one platform. What we experienced in the following days was incredible. We were approached by hundreds of men with unbelievable offers.
We thought it would be a huge shame to reflect this in just a short video. So we decided to make an independent film.
Speaking of news, you've been using different services. Did the representatives of these services react in any way when they found out what was going on under their covers?
About three months before the film was released in cinemas, we met with the senior management of Seznam, whose Lidé.cz website we used a lot for communication as part of our project. We presented the whole problem to them, and I even left one of our girls' profiles on the computer during our meeting. During the hour-long meeting there were dozens of messages. They were amazed to see it in real time.
They told us that they would look into it, that they were very impressed. The next day they told me they were even considering either closing it down or selling it. However, there was no major push from the press or the public, so in the end they had no reason to do anything about it.
Although only girls are featured in the documentary, child abuse on the internet also involves boys, how much did you address that side of things as well?
You're hitting on one of the biggest weaknesses of our film. We're trying to make up for it in the children's version. There are overdubs of the girls speaking, and at three points in the children's version we emphasize that it affects boys as well. However, we don't have a boy in the documentary for two reasons. Firstly, we couldn't get a boy with that specific non-acting and credible speech who was over 18 years old, yet came across as a 12 year old. It's easier with girls. Boys have different pitched voices, beards and facial features that give them away.
The second thing is that the topic of sexual identity and orientation comes into it. Boys at this impressionable age who have the urge to text a guy are also checking out whether they are more likely to like guys. We knew we wouldn't have the capacity to address that subtopic there yet.
You talk about men all the time, but what about women? I mean, women who might abuse young boys online?
Out of the 2,500 contacts we had during the making of the film, about 30 of them were women, and I would venture to guess that half of them were suspicious enough that it was clear that they were men. Women don't work that way, and experts say that when they do, it's usually for blackmail purposes and not for any kind of gratification. But it's true that ultimately online abuse affects boys just as much, even at that impressionable age of 11 to 12 they are even more at risk than girls.
We're talking 2,500 contacts. Are all these contacts already being investigated by the police?
That's a bit more complicated. The police first dealt mainly with the men who showed up for personal meetings because they saw it as a preparation for a crime. It was only three months ago that we were asked to supply data on several dozen more men who had only communicated online. To date, the police have dealt with about 55 men for whom they have assessed that the communication lasted long enough, was sufficiently brutal, conclusive and dangerous.
It must be taken into account that the girls managed to communicate with about "only" 500 men. Those 2,500 were the outreach. In short, guys who sent a signal that they wanted to talk, etc. For example, the police don't deal with a guy who wrote that one of our girls is beautiful and that he'd like to see her do it. Although this is a terrible act, the police need the contact to last longer so that it is clear that maybe he made a mistake and didn't want to write to someone else.
It is true that people contact us about this and write to us asking why they are not all being prosecuted, that it is terrible. But unfortunately it's not that simple.
I guess that's why it's primary to do outreach from the other side? Start from parents and children?
Exactly, that way the whole problem can be dealt with much more effectively. The weakest link in this phenomenon are the parents, who think that if a child sits in front of a computer in his room, he is perfectly safe. 65% of Czech parents do not even know what sites their child is visiting. Yet children live online for three to four hours a day.
Every day, parents are releasing their children onto an island where they have no idea where they are, what is going on, what the inhabitants are, what the laws and rules are. Nothing. The children return from this island after three hours and nobody asks them what it was like. By making it only virtual, the parents don't realize that there might be some danger. But that's a misconception. Children experience everything there very intensely and strongly. Including falling in love and so on. In fact, the sexuality of today's children begins on the Internet. And it's hard porn, which in turn can distort their idea of how they should behave during their first sex. So the internet is really a very powerful source of information, and parents don't realise that.
That is why I come back to the fact that the problem is not so much solvable on the part of men, but on the part of children, parents and maybe even teachers, who have to spread awareness and warn those who might become victims. The Internet is really dangerous. And that is not all in the film. We have filmed really far worse disgusting things that children can encounter there.
Is it in your interest to make a sequel to the documentary?
I get this question quite often, but personally I don't want to lock myself in a drawer and spend the next ten years making films about the ills of the internet. And there are many topics.
I'm keeping an eye on it. Although we've had a lot of related topics that people have come forward with. For example, I've been contacted by a number of young women who have been abused in the family. It is a far more painful and widespread phenomenon and the numbers are astronomical. I have a number of such letters and emails. But I don't plan to elaborate on a similar topic yet. We'll see...
