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Documentaries can help fuel change or can be incorporated into larger established campaigns to drive impact. Each film examined in this report had a number of specific goals, which related to the type of social
funded by television channels, documentaries receive money from a number of sources, including film funds, private investors and foundations. Rather than observing, documentaries are now thought capable of changing the world. Is this what they really do? How do we define a documentary? What does it mean to be the ‘author’ of a film? Nick Fraser
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Within this context the aim of this thesis is to understand why documentary films can be an effective tool for direct representation of certain social issues as well as a convincing method for influencing the perspective of the audience on a particular issue.
- Amin Palangi
- Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction
- Escaping Two Dimensions
- A Kaleidoscope of Humanity
- Unique Narrative Experiences
- A Subjective View
- Present The Human Face
- Emotional Impact
- Reveal Worlds You Thought You Knew
- Show How The World Really Works
- Feature Amazing Individuals
In a world beset by Fake News and influencers vying for attention for products, it’s more important than ever to have insights based on real events and actions. To have a real person at the heart of the conversation and narrative. The great thing about documentary production is that truth is often stranger than fiction – meaning that what happens i...
Much of so-called factual television is two-dimensional. The same is true of the endless stream of three-star movies found on streaming services. They may entertain, but somehow they feel far removed from life. The reason is that it’s difficult to develop complex characters in fiction, especially given the commercial pressure to follow rote plot fo...
In this sense, the nonfiction film form of documentary is a wonderful and rich kaleidoscope of human experience, showing us how diverse and multidimensional we are, individually and collectively.
Documentaries are a unique art form, a unique creative medium that brings glimpses of real life directly into the audience’s consciousness. This is because in documentary storytelling real life is put into a dramatic or narrative form to work as a film. They are powerful stories told in a powerful way when the filmmaker knows his craft. Documentari...
A documentary, regardless of how it is touted by TV or other outlets, is always a subjective exercise and experience. It is an account of a subject told from the filmmakers’ point of view. They are often very persistent in their search for facts and opinions from people who have direct experience with the subject or are involved in the story. As a ...
Documentaries put a human face on an important issue. For example, the 2002 film Bowling for Columbine put human faces to the Columbine High School massacre alongside the gun violence discourse, the 2012 film The Act of Killingput a human face on the perpetrators of the Indonesian mass killings of 1965-66. Documentary film has a rich tradition of t...
Well-made documentaries are packed with powerful emotion and drama. This is because it is the only way to construct a film that tells a story on the screen that resonates with the audience. The usual rules of storytelling – character arcs, theme, pacing, narrative structure, etc. – apply to documentaries just as they do to feature films. The emotio...
The beauty of a well-researched and made documentary is that it gives audiences new perspectives on familiar topics. We all have pretty entrenched views about certain things, but documentaries are really good at revealing new things about history, politics, society, culture, and other important topics. That’s because a good documentary filmmaker wi...
Much of how higher-level politics and geopolitics work is hidden from the public. Either because, frankly, they have limited interest in it. Or because it is in the interest of powerful people not to make these things transparent. But a good documentary can shed light on these operations in a way that people can not otherwise see, by focusing on sp...
One of the great privileges of making documentaries around the world for more than 20 years was that I had the opportunity to travel the world and meet and work with some of the most interesting people at all levels of politics and society. For example, I had the great honor of shooting with Walter Munk for my last film, The Warning. Walter, who ha...
Documentary films have become an important channel for audiences to process and decipher information today. Having an inherent power to critically address contemporary issues in a threadbare manner, they have a cornucopia of new insights for tackling different problems plaguing our society.
- Matthew C . Nisbet
But the educational purpose of documentary reveals fundamental ambiguities that should be acknowledged and understood. On the one hand, as argued by Kahana, documentary can be seen as a “democratic” form of culture, as it represents “real” people (often belo nging to the lower part of society), raises
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Recent films such as Fahrenheit 9/11, Supersize Me, An Inconvenient Truth, Food Inc., and Sicko have generated attention to how documentaries can shape debates over social issues and policy questions.
