Audun Amundsen trained as a renewable-energy engineer, survived a paralyzing stroke at 23, and spent the better part of fifteen years in the Indonesian jungle making Newtopia. When he came home, he found a stranger wilderness waiting: the digital jungle of online gurus, sales funnels, and engagement algorithms, which became his new film, Click the Link Below, world-premiered at Doc Edge in Auckland.
It’s more a human story set in a digital environment. So it’s two very different jungles.
Two Jungles
The symmetry is the whole point. In Newtopia, Amundsen spent three continuous years (and many more on and off) with the shaman Aman Paksa’s family on the island of Mentawai, documenting a culture’s lurch from barter to money, from oars to motors, from signs in the forest to smartphones. That film, a study of human nature and adaptation, won Best International Documentary at the Balinale in Indonesia itself, an answer of sorts to anyone who would dismiss it as a white man in the jungle, since Amundsen had spent fifteen years there, learned the unwritten Mentawai language, and taught a local English in order to do so. (Between the two came a lighter film, Help, I’ve Gone Viral, about a friend whose song went viral overnight.) While he was off the grid, social media swallowed the rest of the world, and he missed it entirely. He returned broke and bewildered, the gurus already multiplying in his feed, promising to make him rich. Click the Link Below follows him down that rabbit hole, paying seven and a half thousand dollars for a course run by Akbar Sheikh, a formerly homeless man turned online millionaire, and traveling to meet him face to face.
The Stroke That Set the Tone
His origin story keeps quietly shaping everything. Two days before he was first due to fly to the jungle, Amundsen had a brain stroke that paralyzed his right side and cost him his speech; doctors gave him a grim prognosis and performed heart surgery they believed had caused it. He trained for a year, recovered, won a small fortune on a lottery scratch card that replaced his drained savings, and bought a one-way ticket to Indonesia, where balancing barefoot through the jungle finished the healing. He blocked the trauma out so completely, he says, that he simply never thought about it again. A man who has already faced the actual end is, it turns out, immune to a particular kind of sales pitch.
Selling the Cure With the Disease
Here’s the stance worth drawing out, because the most striking thing about Amundsen is a contradiction he is fully aware of. He critiques the manipulative funnels and fear-of-missing-out tactics of the guru economy, and he uses those exact tactics to sell his own films. He keeps his VOD rights, builds a “film funnel,” crafts an irresistible offer, and markets his documentary with the same machinery the film indicts. This is not hypocrisy. It is the thesis enacted. Amundsen’s sensibility across both jungles is that the tool is neutral and the human wielding it is everything. The algorithm, he argues, is not a villain but an amplifier.
The algorithm is taking advantage of our bad human traits. We want things instantly, we react to scarcity, we react to extreme stuff.
It magnifies whatever is already in us, rewarding the extreme and, as a Facebook whistleblower he interviews explains, amplifying harmful content because outrage travels fastest. The gurus are simply expert marketers who read that system correctly and adapted, the way the Mentawai adapted to money. So when Amundsen runs his own film through a funnel, he completes the argument rather than betraying it: the same mechanism that amplifies snake oil can amplify a fifteen-year labor of love, and the difference is never the tool but the cargo it carries. With Newtopia, strangers bought the film for two hundred dollars a copy, and he funneled the money straight back to the community on screen, turning down a cigarette brand’s offer to sponsor a cafe renovation and instead financing a traditional house so the film’s main character could retire on his own terms. It helps that Norway’s system can publicly fund a documentary up to ninety percent, freeing him from investor pressure to chase the work itself. The “click the link below” of his title is both the trap and the escape, the very same gesture pointed at a worthless course or a real film, with only the destination changing. He even, briefly, tried to become a kind of guru himself, coaching other documentary makers on selling their work, before deciding it pulled him too far from the films.
Why He Refused the Takedown
This is why his refusal to make an exposé matters so much. A polarizing takedown would have flattened Sheikh and the others into villains and let the audience feel superior, which is exactly the binary, love-it-or-hate-it reflex the algorithm rewards. Amundsen does the harder thing, meeting Sheikh behind the facade and finding a man working out of a modest apartment who seems to genuinely believe his own “make more, give more” mantra, until something like friendship forms. Together they tour ever more polished and cult-like coaches, culminating in a surreal mega-event staged by Russell Brunson, the co-founder of ClickFunnels who proudly owns a million-dollar first edition of a Depression-era self-help bible. His model here is the patient, character-driven documentary that lets people speak for themselves.
He cites Juan Carlos Rulfo’s In the Pit, the Sundance-winning portrait of the laborers building a Mexico City freeway, a film with no narration and no judgment, only human beings rendered whole, alongside a lifelong love of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. His film belongs beside two he doesn’t name: The Social Dilemma, the systemic indictment of engagement algorithms, and Vikram Gandhi’s Kumaré, in which a filmmaker infiltrates the guru economy only to discover the tender, complicated humanity beneath the hustle.
The Thing Worth Having
The deepest rhyme is between the man who survived the stroke and the film’s conclusion. The entire engine of online manipulation runs on the fear of being left behind, of missing the one secret that will save you, and Amundsen has already walked through the real ending and out the other side. His films keep arriving at the same unfashionable conclusion that the eighty-six-year Harvard happiness study he features reaches too: that the thing worth having was never the secret or the money or the edge, but warm connection, the friend in the jungle who becomes family. What revived him during the draining months inside the funnel was not a course but a woman, long walks in the countryside, and finishing his film. He sells that conclusion through a funnel engineered to exploit the opposite belief, and the contradiction is not a flaw in the work. It is the work. For filmmakers, his practical gospel is the same lesson stripped of mysticism: keep your VOD rights, market your film as thoughtfully as you shoot it, and never let the money become the motivation, because chasing two rabbits at once means catching neither. He is unbothered, too, by the polish the algorithm prizes, insisting that raw and real beats a pristine image every time, and that a story honestly told will always outlast the gloss. He is already off again, this time onto the open sea, filming a sailing documentary with his own family aboard.
