First there was the binary – fiction versus nonfiction. But increasingly, the “hybrid” film and the polished documentary is muddying the binary. This raises a few pertinent questions. If a filmmaker is intervening in the scene, to make it look better, slicker, more amenable to cinema, at what point does it become fictive? When does the relationship between the subject and filmmaker change into that of a protagonist and director? Now, we have films which are uninterested in being slotted as either fiction or non-fiction. Categories can be reductive, but they can also act as guardrails – what is truth? What is performed truth? Do they braid each other until the distinction disappears?
