Flyout Menu
Main Menu
Saturday, June 13
8:30 PM - 10:00 PM

Regal Gallery Place

701 7th St NW, Washington, DC 20001

for all screenings

The Whole World is a Lie

Director

Charlie Birns

Executive Producers

Robert Greene, Susan Norget

Producer

Charlie Birns

Co-Producer

Luke Stevens

Editor

David Lieberman

Co-Editors

Katie McQuerrey, Juliette Hüsler

Consulting Editor

David Barker

Cinematographer

Peter Buntaine

Composer

Daniel Wohl

Contact

Be With Media hello@bewith.us

A vérité chronicle of a legendary New York Method acting class is upended when the students and teacher revolt against the film. Both the project’s director and a student in the class, Charlie is drawn into the same “Method” he set out to document, blurring the line between observer and subject until the film becomes a study of performance, authorship, and the documentary form—where authenticity itself emerges as the most seductive act.

A next chapter in the canon of reflexive documentaries (a lineage that includes the film’s executive producer, Robert Greene), THE WHOLE WORLD IS A LIE refracts a single room into a prism of our era’s fixation on what is real. Tense, often funny, and spiritually searching, it is a portrait of power, ego, and emotional transformation, asking whether truth can be captured—or only created.

LrdfWXhZF5bRGxg1DmdTFDyHiaH68gR0mmONn6ZclMI

Charlie Birns

Director, The Whole World Is a Lie

Charlie Birns is a filmmaker whose work spans experimental, narrative, and documentary forms. He began his career in production on Law & Order and went on to work closely with theater and film directors including Sam Gold and Jodie Foster.

He has directed several experimental short films, including MILL/LADY (Lincoln Center) and WEASEL (Anthology Film Archives). As a producer, his projects have premiered at Cannes, Sitges, and SXSW. His narrative feature debut HUMAN AFFAIRS (2018), starring Kerry Condon and shot by Sean Price Williams, premiered at Slamdance and went on to win multiple Grand Jury Prizes, with the Maryland Film Festival calling it “a work of emphatic beauty.”

After relocating from New York to Los Angeles in 2018, Birns pursued graduate studies at UCLA, where his engagement with spiritual traditions and consciousness studies—including Zen, Vedanta, and Jungian analysis—informed his evolving practice. His latest film, THE WHOLE WORLD IS A LIE, marks his first documentary feature.

BACK TO FILMS