ABSTRACT
The chapter posits that no matter how inventive or innovative the form of hybrid documentary, the inherent value of this approach is its relationship to the truth. For example, the value and extraordinary global impact of the hybrid documentary feature film, The Act of Killing would simply vanish if it was revealed that the acts of killing it depicts had never occurred in history or that the protagonist Anwar was not a homicidal and unapologetic mass murderer involved in the 1965 Indonesian genocide but an amateur actor from Tahiti. There is an important inviolate divide between fiction based on history and documentary using cinematic devices to explore and uncover the truth about the past. What constrains us are issues of trust, ethics, transparency and obligations to both subject and audience. These are not to be tossed aside lightly. It is far more productive to measure hybrid documentary through the prism of historical and contemporary philosophical explorations of ethics and the truth than through an unproblematic notion of mixing the real and the made-up.
