“Deceived” by Mel White, filmed several months after the Jonestown tragedy
There has been a number of documentaries on Jonestown, but none have captivated me more than Mel White’s film, Deceived, which was shot shortly after the murders. It includes rare interviews with several Jonestown survivors, including Al and Jeannie Mills just a year before their own mysterious killings.
What makes Deceived different from other documentaries is when it was filmed: 1979, when the deaths were still fresh in the minds of the survivors and the greater public. A few survivors who no longer (or are able to) do interviews about the massacre freely spoke their minds on camera: Al and Jeannie Mills, murdered in 1980; Daphene Mills, murdered alongside her parents in 1980; Wayne Pietila who died in 2011; Bonnie Thielmann, who died in 2017. Other rare survivor interviews were with Lena Pietila and Tim Stoen - people you don’t really see or hear from in more recent documentaries.
The fact that the film was shot in 1979 - with its subdued colors, slightly grainy camera, and interviewees wearing 70s hairstyles and clothing - really takes you back to the time of the tragedy. Instead of making you feel distant from the world of Jim Jones and Peoples Temple, it takes you there.
I believe this film is also one of the few, if not the only one, that includes what appears to be a montage of Greg Robinson’s last photos, which were black-and-white shots of Jonestown’s residents in varying moods: smiling, pensive, lost in thought.
And finally, the film also shows Lou Gurvich’s heartbreaking search for his daughter, Jan, who once enthusiastically worked as a teacher in Jonestown, and who was now lost in the layers of bodies that covered the jungle.