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 film consists mainly of interviews with readers of Freud in Brazil and several places in Europe, and touches on topics such as history, translation, culture, language and, especially, Freud himself.