A documentary film is a non-fictional motion picture intended to "document reality, primarily for instruction, education or maintaining a historical record". The American author and media analyst Bill Nichols has characterized the documentary in terms of "a filmmaking practice, a cinematic tradition, and mode of audience reception [that remains] a practice without clear boundaries".
Errol Mark Morris is an American film director known for documentaries that interrogate the epistemology of their subjects, and the invention of the Interrotron. In 2003, his The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. His film The Thin Blue Line placed fifth on a Sight & Sound poll of the greatest documentaries ever made. Morris is known for making films about unusual subjects; Fast, Cheap & Out of Control interweaves the stories of an animal trainer, a topiary gardener, a robot scientist, and a naked mole-rat specialist.
Werner Herzog is a German filmmaker, actor, opera director, and author. Regarded as a pioneer of New German Cinema, his films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams, people with unusual talents in obscure fields, or individuals in conflict with nature. His style involves avoiding storyboards, emphasizing improvisation, and placing his cast and crew into real situations mirroring those in the film they are working on.
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser is a 1974 West German drama film written and directed by Werner Herzog and starring Bruno S. and Walter Ladengast. The film closely follows the real story of foundling Kaspar Hauser, using the text of actual letters found with Hauser.
Cinéma vérité is a style of documentary filmmaking developed by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, inspired by Dziga Vertov's theory about Kino-Pravda. It combines improvisation with use of the camera to unveil truth or highlight subjects hidden behind reality. It is sometimes called observational cinema, if understood as pure direct cinema: mainly without a narrator's voice-over. There are subtle, yet important, differences between terms expressing similar concepts. Direct cinema is largely concerned with the recording of events in which the subject and audience become unaware of the camera's presence: operating within what Bill Nichols, an American historian and theoretician of documentary film, calls the "observational mode", a fly on the wall. Many therefore see a paradox in drawing attention away from the presence of the camera and simultaneously interfering in the reality it registers when attempting to discover a cinematic truth.
Les Blank was an American documentary filmmaker best known for his portraits of American traditional musicians.
Sheffield DocFest is an international documentary festival and industry marketplace held annually in Sheffield, England.
International Documentary Association (IDA), founded in 1982, is a non-profit 501(c)(3) that promotes nonfiction filmmakers, and is dedicated to increasing public awareness for the documentary genre. Their major program areas are: Advocacy, Filmmaker Services, Education, and Public Programs and Events.
Joshua Lincoln Oppenheimer is an American film director based in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is known for his Oscar-nominated films The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014). Oppenheimer was a 1997 Marshall Scholar and a 2014 recipient of the MacArthur fellowship.
André Felix Vitus Singer is a British documentary film-maker and an anthropologist. He is currently Chief Creative Officer of Spring Films Ltd of London, a Professorial Research Associate at the London School of Oriental and African Studies, and emeritus president of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland where he was president from 2014 to 2018.
Into the Abyss is a 2011 documentary film written and directed by Werner Herzog. It is about capital punishment, and focuses on a triple homicide that occurred in Montgomery County, Texas, in 2001. In the film, Herzog interviews the two young men convicted of the crime, Michael Perry and Jason Burkett, as well as family members and acquaintances of the victims and criminals, and individuals who have taken part in executions in Texas. The primary focus of the film is not the details of the case or the question of Michael and Jason's guilt or innocence, and, although Herzog's voice can be heard as he conducts the interviews, there is a minimal amount of narration, and he never appears onscreen, unlike in many of his films.
The Act of Killing is a 2012 documentary film directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, with Christine Cynn and an anonymous Indonesian co-directing. The film follows individuals who participated in the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66, wherein alleged communists and people opposed to the New Order regime were tortured and killed, with the killers, many becoming gangsters, still in power throughout the country. The film was mostly filmed in Medan, North Sumatra, following the executioner Anwar Congo and his acquaintances as they, upon Oppenheimer's request, re-enact their killings and talk about their actions openly, also following Congo's psychological journey facing the topic.
Final Cut for Real ApS is a film production company based in Copenhagen, Denmark specializing in documentaries for the international market. The two Oscar-nominated groundbreaking documentaries The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014) helped establish the company as a recognized provider of independent creative documentaries on the international stage. The recent years, Final Cut for Real has also expanded to fiction films and virtual reality. In 2019 Final Cut for Real Norway was established.
Signe Byrge Sørensen is a Danish film producer. She is the head of and co-founder of the film production company Final Cut for Real in Copenhagen, Denmark. Sørensen and film director Joshua Oppenheimer were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for the 2013 film The Act of Killing. She was also the producer to the critically acclaimed documentary The Look of Silence. Signe Byrge Sørensen a member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Danish Film Academy. In 2022, she produced the animated documentary film Flee and was nominated in Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and Best Animated Feature categories.
The Look of Silence is a 2014 internationally co-produced documentary film directed by Joshua Oppenheimer about the Indonesian mass killings of 1965–66. The film is a companion piece to his 2012 documentary The Act of Killing. Executive producers were Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, and Andre Singer. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 88th Academy Awards.
Clive Oppenheimer is a British volcanologist, and Professor of Volcanology in the Department of Geography of the University of Cambridge.
Nomad: In the Footsteps of Bruce Chatwin is a 2019 British documentary film by German director Werner Herzog. It chronicles the life of British travel writer Bruce Chatwin and includes interviews with Chatwin's widow, Elizabeth Chatwin, and biographer Nicholas Shakespeare, as well as detailing Herzog's own friendship and collaboration with the man.
Erik Nelson is an American documentary film director and television producer. Nelson has produced and directed several films, television specials and television programs such as Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Mega Disasters, When Good Times Go Bad, What Were You Thinking?, Unsolved History, Prehistoric Predators and More than Human.
Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds is a 2020 documentary film directed by Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer. The film explores the cultural, spiritual, and scientific impact of meteorites, and the craters they create around the globe.
