‘All Illusions Must Be Broken’ Documentary Probes Mankind’s Capacity for Violence

variety.com:

Steven Gaydos Executive VP of Content “Do you guys ever think about dying?” asks the titular toy at the center of Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach’s inventive and ambitious screenplay for the mega-hit comedy “Barbie.” In their yarn, the virus of death awareness is planted in Barbie World by a daydreaming Mattel employee named Gloria, who randomly sketches Thoughts of Impending Death Barbie at work one day, thus triggering the tale of the famed doll’s journey from plastic prop to self-empowered woman.

I wasn’t daydreaming, but I was casually musing out loud on X, formerly known as Twitter, after my first viewing of “Barbie” about how the film seemed heavily influenced by a book I first read 50 years ago: Ernest Becker’s 1974 Pulitzer Prize winner, “The Denial of Death.” For the uninitiated, Becker’s central thesis is summarized in “Death” as “the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity — activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.” I quickly got a private message from documentary filmmaker Laura Dunn.

Dunn not only saw the straight line from “Barbie” to Becker, but also wanted me to know that along with her life and directing partner, Jef Sewell, she had just made a feature documentary, “All Illusions Must Be Broken,” which will have its world premiere in the True Stories section of the Palm Springs Film Festival Jan.

10. “Illusions” is all about Becker, his life and his potent message of human liberation from fear, anger and the violence that all but defines our species.