Documentary films have become more diverse, experimental and popular than ever before. Here we consider why, and survey the genre’s game-changers

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As long as there have been films, a few have had the temerity to be about stuff that actually happened in the real world. Yet across the course of the last century, documentaries were relegated to the bottom of the industry’s cultural hierarchy, coming to be seen as something less than cinema – glorified television perhaps, or the hallmark of a slow release week.

In the last decade, all that’s been turned on its head, as a handful of factors have conspired to render non-fiction film-making the liveliest pocket of the cinematic coat. For one thing, the films themselves – singular creations such as The Arbor, Citizenfour and Banksy’s Exit Through The Gift Shop – have fought tooth and nail to expand not just their audiences but their horizons. They’ve rejected the insipid library music and staid talking heads of yesteryear and instead borrowed from the rainbow of stylistic devices available to dramatic film-makers.

Technology has also levelled the cinematic playing field. As more and more films have left the cinema and arrived in our homes, or on our phones, documentaries have been spared the Sisyphean task of competing with the latest Marvel Studios megalith for each potential ticket sale. Instead, fiction and non-fiction are now thrown together on low-cost subscription services that draw no distinction between the two. And while new camera and editing technologies have been adopted across the film industry, they’ve been especially beneficial to doc-makers, who can now effortlessly sift through 10 hours of dung beetles in search of one perfect shot for Planet Earth II.

Our appetite for documentaries has changed, too. Viewers will today binge-watch serialised doc OJ: Made In America in a single weekend, and push Louis Theroux’s first big-screen outing towards the £1m mark at the UK box office. At the same time, dyed-in-the-wool fiction film-makers – from MOR kingpin Ron Howard to leftfield darling Jim Jarmusch and Selma director Ava DuVernay – are scrambling to jump aboard the non-fiction bandwagon.

Institutions that continue to distinguish between docs and dramas, meanwhile, feel increasingly anachronistic, as the line between fiction and non-fiction films begins to blur. Indeed, many of the key works of this burgeoning documentary golden age have blended real and fictive elements with abandon. Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act Of Killing remains perhaps the only Oscar nominee in which a confessed murderer performs a song-and-dance number under a waterfall.

That kind of nuance seems to be spreading, with audiences welcoming a new definition of documentary that’s broader and livelier than ever before. Here are just a few of the vibrant scenes springing up in the land of the real… CL

STAR VEHICLES

Michael Moore, outside Trumpland.

Sometimes it’s less about the story than who’s telling it – and you trust the brand even if you don’t know exactly what you’re getting. Some film-makers literally have a voice: Werner Herzog’s films wouldn’t be the same without his trademark Teutonic disdain; Adam Curtis’s lecturing style adds to the portent of his revelations. It’s difficult to imagine others getting the same results if they stayed behind the camera. And they do get results.

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Michael Moore’s campaigning films might not swing elections but they shape national debates (as with his recent Michael Moore In TrumpLand). Grayson Perry has a disarming way of getting along with absolutely anyone. Louis Theroux’s excruciating silences force people to talk. And Nick Broomfield’s shambolic investigations often get to truth (his last film for HBO targeted serial killer The Grim Sleeper, who’s since been apprehended). They’re accused of seeking the limelight but it’s never easy or safe making films like this. After all, putting yourself in the frame often means putting yourself on the line.

NOW SHOWING: Grayson Perry explores transgender identity in Born Risky, a series of shorts on All 4. Werner Herzog’s latest Lo And Behold: Reveries Of The Connected World is out on DVD and Blu-ray on 5 Dec, while his Into The Inferno is currently on Netflix. Book in some time for HyperNormalisation, Adam Curtis’s 166-minute study of where we are now via BBC iPlayer. SR

NEW-GEN ROCK DOCS

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Liam Gallagher of Oasis in Mat Whitecross’s Supersonic. Photograph: Ignition/eOne

Dust swirls over Nick Cave’s piano in 3D as the grief process and the creative process collide in Andrew Dominik’s One More Time With Feeling. Wilko Johnson plays chess with Death in Julien Temple’s 11th-hour biopic about the Dr Feelgood guitarist. Wolf Alice share their bus with actors in Michael Winterbottom’s part-fictionalised tour diary, On The Road. The sheer quantity of music documentaries being produced today is overwhelming – but notable too is their quality. No longer just a part of the album promo cycle, they are flashing a AAA pass at the realm of high art.

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The last three years have produced two masterpieces of archival profiling in Amy and Cobain: Montage Of Heck. Meanwhile, Cave has invited the cameras in not once but twice (first for intimate portrait 20,000 Days On Earth). This year, Mat Whitecross’s cunningly edited Supersonic reunited Oasis in spirit rather than reality. The BBC4’s recent investment in music stories – their Kate Bush docs have proved particularly popular – also speaks volumes about the medium’s burgeoning appeal. You no longer have to dig the subject’s back catalogue to fall under a music doc’s spell.

COMING SOON: Gimme Danger. Jim Jarmusch’s new Stooges doc is out in cinemas from 18 November; One More Time With Feeling is in limited cinemas on 1 December. BT

ARTISTIC ACTIVISM

The revolution will be televised, it seems – maybe even on the big screen. Activist docs have risen in the 21st century to encompass varied voices, spanning Michael Moore’s blockbuster style to smart unions such as Brit director Michael Winterbottom and Canadian activist Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine), historic archives and modern revelations.

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Most of these films highlight grassroots issues; many now command powerful platforms. Writer-director Ava DuVernay recently released 13th, examining the US constitution’s treatment of slavery, incarceration and race relations, which recently opened the New York film festival. Dawn Porter’s Trapped, about US abortion laws, has been tipped for the Oscars. Cowspiracy, an agriculture industry doc, inspired a new version, exec-produced by Hollywood’s foremost eco warrior Leonardo DiCaprio.

The mainstream impact of independent docs can be startling and their scope can prove galvanising, whether it’s the Aids activism doc How To Survive A Plague or Dreamcatcher’s stories of Chicago sex workers. There’s also Everyday Rebellion, about global non-violent resistance, described by its directors the Riahi brothers as “a celebration of life”. An optimistic idea drives the heaviest docs: that film can effect real change.

NOW SHOWING: There’s more eco-Leo in climate change treatise Before The Flood, currently streaming on Nat Geo’s YouTube channel. AH

THE INSIDERS

Facebook Twitter Pinterest NYC mayoral hopeful Anthony, disgraced star of Weiner. Photograph: Everett/REX/Shutterstock

These days you can’t call yourself an institution without a documentary exposing your inner workings. The September Issue famously made a star out of Grace Coddington and gave Vogue a human face, while Page One: Inside The New York Times showed the Grey Lady attempting to adjust to a digital world. Documentary-makers are sharing space with investigative reporters: it’s arguable that Blackfish has damaged SeaWorld beyond repair, an environmental feat that DiCaprio (yup, him again) will be hoping to emulate with his exec-produced elephant crisis doc The Ivory Game. Scientology doc Going Clear, of course, was a global headline spinner.

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Early bets for 2017 Oscar glory should go to Josh Kriegman and Elyse Sternberg’s Weiner, an extraordinary fly-on-the-wall doc about the disgraced politician Anthony, and if the giddy pace of present-day politics isn’t enough to have you reaching for the tinfoil hat, Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour tells the paranoia-inducing story of Edward Snowden and the NSA. Even British TV is getting in on the information overload – fixed-rig television has ushered in a new era of intimacy in which all facets of life, from school days (the Educating… series) to romance (First Dates), are served up for your analysis and dissection.

NOW SHOWING: The Ivory Game is on Netflix now. RN



EXPERIMENTAL

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Heart of a Dog director Laurie Anderson. Photograph: Dogwoof

Back in the age of cinéma vérité, it was felt that feature-film techniques had no place in documentaries. The turnaround since then – post-Errol Morris, say – couldn’t be more complete, and formal experimentation has run riot in the last 20 years, and more so in the last five. One imagines old ideological purists wincing at the visual pyrotechnics of Adam Curtis, or Joshua Oppenheimer’s use of that erstwhile documentary taboo, dramatic re-enactment. Andrew Dominick and Wim Wenders have both incorporated 3D into wildly contrasting docs about mourning and ballet (One More Time With Feeling, Pina), while Clio Barnard’s The Arbor used lip-synching to deeply eerie effect.

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And with movies such as Roger Ross Williams’s Life, Animated (out here on 9 Dec), Brett Morgen’s Chicago 10 and Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir, even animation has been bent to serious documentary purposes. Simplicity also works: both Jafar Panahi’s This Is Not A Film, filmed while he was banned from film-making, and Laurie Anderson’s Heart Of A Dog, a meditation on grief, are self-conscious anti-home movies, both making a virtue of limitations. Often these once-proscribed techniques can come closer to other kinds of truth than mere “verite”.

NOW SHOWING: Alexander Sokurov’s eerie Louvre/Nazi doc-drama Francofonia, out in selected cinemas. JP

TRUE CRIME

Facebook Twitter Pinterest OJ: Made in America. Photograph: Publicity image

True-life crime stories have long been a tabloid staple, with nosey-parker sensationalism often reframed as cautionary tales. But a resurgence in thoughtful, meditative and often quietly furious examinations of crime and punishment has made this storied subgenre the current kingpin of on-screen non-fiction. Who’s the culprit? You could point an accusing finger at Serial, the 2014 megahit podcast that patiently walked the world through the evidential minutiae of a horrible 1999 murder and subsequent shoddy prosecution. Certainly, many of the recent ascendant breed of true crime docs seem to share some of Serial’s questing DNA.

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These features and, increasingly, TV series re-examine high-profile murders (the monumental eight-hour OJ: Made In America; Netflix’s recent Amanda Knox), reignite cold cases (procedural hit Making A Murderer, mumbled manhunt The Jinx), unpick the war on drugs (from Cartel Land’s volatile border vigilantes to the gamed US systems of The House I Live In) and even – in the case of the disturbing (T)error – ride shotgun with a steamrollering FBI sting. Guilt trips have never been so addictive.

COMING SOON: Alex “Going Clear” Gibney’s docuseries The Killing Season starts 22 November on Crime & Investigation. GV

LEGACY DOCS

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Crytic rocker Orion, the subject of Orion: The Man Who Would Be King. Photograph: Sun Records

When celeb bio-docs are 10-a-penny, it’s no wonder directors are drawn to putting culture’s unsung heroes in the frame for the first time. Often it’s about crediting those who influenced from the sidelines: Everything Is Copy profiled Nora Ephron, the unsparing writer who later defined the modern romcom. In Life Itself, a beautiful movie about Chicago film critic Roger Ebert’s vivid life and dying days, no less than Martin Scorsese cites him as an inspiration. Bill Cunningham New York marvelled at the tireless 81-year-old New York Times street photographer, and featured Iris Apfel, the eccentric 93-year-old “geriatric starlet” and subject of Albert Maysles’s Iris.

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Other docs make previous unknowns into icons: Searching For Sugar Man exposed Mexican-American songwriter Sixto Rodriguez’s surprising role in the anti-apartheid movement, Jeanie Finlay’s Orion: Man Who Would Be King last year unmasked Elvis sound-and-lookalike Jimmy Ellis, and Finding Vivian Maier established the children’s nanny among the 20th century’s finest photographers. These empathetic studies of fleeting eras remind us that influence doesn’t always equal fame.

COMING SOON: The Eagle Huntress follows a young girl’s journey to become her Kazakh family’s first female eagle hunter, out in cinemas on 16 December. LS

CURIOSITIES

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tickled Director: David Farrier & Dylan Reeve Starring: David Farrier, Dylan Reeve, David Starr Photograph: A Ticklish Tale Limited

In an age when any hobbyist can meet friends with the same quirks online, documentarists find gold in unseen, teeming subcultures. Niche docs thrive on TV, especially on Channel 4, where sex generates the easiest buzz. But good fetish-gawp docs have more than titillation, from the wistful escapism of the dog-people in Secret Life Of The Human Pups to the psychosexual darkness of lonely Brits yanking each other’s trackie bottoms down in Dogging Tales. The fully clothed enthusiasts in The Secret World Of Lego are just as revealing. Some programmes give a singular human a flash of immortality: nobody who saw The Lost Gold Of The Highlands on BBC4 will forget bounty-hunting outcast Garnet Frost. On the big screen, strange nooks lead somewhere else. Sinister power games lie behind a weird video craze in Tickled; in Finders Keepers, a bizarre spat over a severed leg ends up being a story about how ordinary oddballs are affected by these moments in the light.

NOW SHOWING: Sonita, the recently released doc about the titular Iranian refugee-turned-rapper. JS