Introduction

There has never before been a time of such rich and formally variant documentary films being made globally. The audience’s tastes run the extreme, from reality TV semi-fictionalized gawk pieces like The Tiger King to high-brow art-house films like Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie, or the form pushing Leviathan from Harvard’s Sensory Ethnography lab, shot entirely with GoPro cameras stuck on the hull of a boat. Documentaries and creative nonfiction provide an incredible opportunity to not only share vital, important stories but also contribute in both small and large ways to not just documenting, but also actually changing the world around us. Thus, some of the most ground-breaking documentaries to emerge in the past decade have really pushed the form and the boundaries of what nonfiction filmmaking could be.