Synopsis

Short synopsis

A filmmaker stumbles upon a video that leaves her with a simple question: what's actually wrong with shoes? The answer, it turns out, involves 245 years of scientific evidence, a global industry that has never changed, and a healthcare system that has completely missed this. Stupid Shoes is an investigative documentary that follows that question — through laboratories, clinics, design studios, and history books — in search of an answer nobody has gone looking for.

Featuring 18 experts — podiatrists, chiropractors, neurosensory specialists, historians, designers, and futurologists — the film is not about what to buy. It's about the systems we trust blindly with our health, and what happens when every single person in those systems has their own perfectly good reasons to stop asking questions.

Long synopsis

In 1781, Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper published his treatise on footwear — one of the earliest known scientific accounts of what shoes do to the human foot. What followed over the next 245 years is one of the strangest stories in modern health: a consistent, well-documented body of research — largely ignored.

Swiss filmmaker Dee Libine began her investigation after watching a short video that raised a question she couldn't shake. What she found — across laboratories, anatomy clinics, design studios, and shoe factories — was not a conspiracy, but something perhaps stranger: organised indifference. Shoe companies optimising for look and margin. Medical schools with no mandatory training on foot health. Governments with no framework to assess it. And consumers sold the idea that comfort is what the cushion feels like in the first thirty seconds.

With 16 specialists, Stupid Shoes builds its case methodically, wryly, and without lecturing. This is edutainment with a thesis: that the most overlooked health story of the last two centuries is sitting on everyone's feet.

Director's Statement

I've been living with this story for over a year now and I still wake up baffled at how absurd some of it is. This isn't really a film about shoes — it's about the systems we trust blindly with our health, and what happens when every single person in those systems has their own perfectly good reasons to stop asking questions.

What surprised me most wasn't the science. The science has been there, reliably, since the 18th century. What surprised me was how clean the story of avoidance is. Nobody is hiding anything. There's no villain. The shoe industry isn't lying — it's doing what every industry does: optimising for the product customers reach for, in the thirty seconds they're standing in a store. Medical education isn't malicious — foot health simply fell through the gaps between disciplines, too orthopaedic for GPs, too general for specialists. Government bodies have no framework because nobody asked them to build one.

That's the film's central provocation: not that someone failed us, but that the system — every part of it — had a perfectly rational reason to keep looking the other way. And because everyone had a reason not to look, no one did.

I started this project as a curious outsider. I made it as one too, because I think that's the right lens for this story. The experts in this film are extraordinary — they've been shouting about this for years, often in rooms that weren't listening. My job was to find the right question, put it to the right people, and get out of the way.

— Dee Libine, Director

About the Director

Dee Libine — Director

Dee Libine (Danielle Libine) is a Swiss documentary filmmaker and entrepreneur. Stupid Shoes is her feature documentary debut, produced through her independent production company Blossom Peak Productions, based in Switzerland.

Drawn to stories that sit in plain sight, unexamined, Libine approaches her subjects as an investigator first — bringing rigour, wit, and a persistent refusal to accept "that's just how it is" as an answer. She is available for press interviews and broadcaster meetings ahead of and following the September 2026 premiere.

Expert Contributors

Stupid Shoes features 16 specialists spanning podiatry, chiropractic, neurosensory science, shoe archaeology, behavioural psychology, footwear design, and foot health education.

About Blossom Peak Productions

Blossom Peak Productions is an independent documentary production company founded by Dee Libine and based in Switzerland. The company makes investigative and human-interest films that sit at the intersection of personal curiosity and systemic investigation — rigorous, edutaining, and never preachy. Stupid Shoes is its debut feature production.

Website: blossompeakprod.com