Category: Film

Documentary is not automatically more truthful than fiction: both are constructed, and the difference lies in the promise each makes to the viewer. A documentary promises that its material is not invented, which is why broadcasters such as the BBC treat any fabrication presented as fact as a breach of trust. Fiction makes no such promise, so its truth is judged by insight, coherence and honesty of feeling rather than by evidence. The most interesting films of the past century sit on the line between the two and make the viewer think hard about which promise is being made.

Where the word documentary comes from

The term itself was born inside an argument about truth. According to the history of documentary film, the Scottish filmmaker John Grierson coined “documentary” in a review of Robert Flaherty’s Moana, published in the New York Sun on 8 February 1926 under the pen name “The Moviegoer”. Grierson defined the form as the “creative treatment of actuality”, a phrase that admits openly that shaping, selecting and arranging are part of the job.

Grierson was more than a theorist. The University of Stirling, which holds his archive, records that he was born in Deanston in 1898, directed Drifters (1929) about the British herring fishing industry, ran the film units of the Empire Marketing Board and the General Post Office in the 1930s, and became the first head of the National Film Board of Canada in 1939. His name lives on in the UK through the Grierson Trust, which runs the Grierson Awards for documentary and factual filmmaking.

The documentary promise and its limits

Flaherty’s own Nanook of the North (1922) shows how early the compromises began. The film’s central figure was played by the hunter Allakariallak, and the interior igloo scenes were shot in a specially built three-walled structure because a real igloo was too small and too dark for Flaherty’s bulky camera, as the production history of Nanook of the North records. Although Allakariallak normally hunted with a gun, Flaherty encouraged him to hunt in the manner of his ancestors. None of this stopped the Library of Congress selecting the film in 1989 for the first group of 25 titles in the US National Film Registry.

The lesson is not that documentary lies, but that every documentary is made. The camera changes behaviour, the edit selects, music guides emotion and a narrator frames meaning. What separates honest work from deception is whether those choices distort what actually happened.

That is exactly where modern broadcasting rules draw the line. The BBC Editorial Guidelines on accuracy state, at section 3.2.3: “The BBC must not knowingly and materially mislead its audiences. Content producers should not distort known facts, present invented material as fact or otherwise undermine audiences’ trust in the BBC’s content.” The key phrase is “present invented material as fact”. Reconstruction, stylisation and selection are allowed; passing off invention as record is not.

How fiction tells the truth

Fiction starts from the opposite agreement. Nobody believes the characters existed exactly as shown, so a drama is free to compress years into minutes, merge several real people into one, or imagine a scene no camera could have witnessed. What it owes the audience is plausibility of behaviour and honesty about human experience.

The clearest British example is Cathy Come Home, the BBC television drama directed by Ken Loach in 1966. The BBC World Service programme Witness History describes it as a hard-hitting film that “changed British ideas about homelessness”, telling the story of a young woman who lost her home, her husband and then her children. It used a documentary look, yet its force came from a constructed story that made a statistical problem feel personal.

Fiction can also carry factual weight that institutions find uncomfortable. Peter Watkins made The War Game for the BBC in 1965, a dramatised documentary imagining the effects of a nuclear strike on Britain. Writing for The Conversation, the researcher John Cook describes how declassified Cabinet Office papers show Whitehall’s involvement in the decision not to broadcast it. The film went on to win the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature and was not shown on television until 1985. A work built from staged scenes was judged by the Academy as documentary truth.

Herzog and the case for ecstatic truth

No filmmaker has argued the point more provocatively than Werner Herzog. His “Minnesota Declaration”, first read at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis on 30 April 1999 and published on his official site, opens with a challenge to cinéma vérité: “It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.” Point five follows: “There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.”

In another essay, also reproduced among his published texts, Herzog adds a memorable warning against confusing information with understanding: if only the factual mattered, the truth “at its most concentrated must reside in the telephone book”.

Herzog’s position is a useful provocation rather than a rulebook. Broadcasters and journalists still need the factual floor he dismisses, and a viewer has a right to know when a documentary has invented something. His argument is strongest as a reminder that facts alone do not produce meaning.

Films that blur the line on purpose

Some of the most admired films in cinema history live in the border zone, and they are worth watching precisely because they make the contract visible.

• Close-Up (1990), by the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, retells the true case of Hossein Sabzian, who impersonated the filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf. The BFI’s entry on Close-Up notes that it mixes 16mm footage of the real trial with re-enactments performed by the family, Sabzian and others playing themselves. It was placed 17th in the 2022 Sight and Sound greatest films poll, which drew ballots from 1,639 critics, programmers, curators, archivists and academics. Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), a non-fiction “city symphony”, came ninth.
• The Thin Blue Line (1988), by Errol Morris, uses what Morris’s own site calls “expressionistic reenactments” alongside interviews and a Philip Glass score. It is credited with overturning the conviction of Randall Dale Adams for the 1976 murder of a Dallas police officer. Stylised, staged images served the pursuit of a factual truth.
• The Act of Killing (2012), directed by Joshua Oppenheimer, invited men who took part in mass killings in Indonesia to dramatise their own past in film genres of their choosing. The film’s official site lists Herzog and Morris as executive producers and quotes Herzog calling it “unprecedented in the history of cinema”. Here fiction became a method of documentary inquiry.

When fiction is mistaken for fact

The opposite risk is drama that audiences read as history. Netflix’s The Crown became the British test case. In November 2020 the then Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden said, as reported by NBC News, that the series was “a beautifully produced work of fiction” and that Netflix should be clear about this at the start, adding: “Without this, I fear a generation of viewers who did not live through these events may mistake fiction for fact.”

The episode shows that the problem is rarely invention itself. Every historical drama invents dialogue. The difficulty arises when a production borrows the authority of record, such as real names, real dates and archive-style imagery, while its scenes are imagined. The more a drama looks like documentary, the more viewers expect documentary standards.

How to judge truth in any film

A few questions work for both forms and help a viewer decide what kind of trust a film has earned.

1. What promise does the film make? Check the credits, the publicity and any opening caption. A “based on true events” line is a very different claim from a documentary label.
2. Are reconstructions signposted? Morris and Kiarostami make their staging obvious; deceptive work hides it.
3. Who is heard and who is absent? Selection is unavoidable, but a fair film shows awareness of the voices it leaves out.
4. Does the emotion fit the evidence? Music and editing can make a thin case feel overwhelming, in fiction and documentary alike.
5. What happens when you check? Read beyond the film. Festival programmes such as Sheffield DocFest and critical writing often discuss method openly.

For a gallery audience, the same questions apply to photography, painting from life and video installation, where the line between record and interpretation is equally unstable. Readers who want more on art and moving image can browse the wider coverage at Visionary Art, and for criticism focused on film the writing of film critic and documentary director Maria Bregman is a further resource.

The real difference

The useful distinction is not true against false but evidence against invention, and honest against dishonest. Documentary earns trust by not fabricating what it presents as record, even while it shapes, stages and selects. Fiction earns trust by being faithful to how people think and behave, even while every event is made up. Grierson’s “creative treatment of actuality”, the BBC’s ban on presenting “invented material as fact” and Herzog’s “ecstatic truth” are three answers to the same problem, and a thoughtful viewer can hold all three at once.

Photo: Achim Raschka, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By VisionaryArt Editorial

Portraiture has always had a difficulty with living sitters. They can answer back, and the audience can compare. Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial, which screens as a Gala at the BFI London Film Festival on 11 October, asks two actors to play men who are alive, powerful and still in the news: Andrew Garfield is Sam Altman, and Yura Borisov is Ilya Sutskever, his co-founder at OpenAI. The film has not yet been shown in Britain. From the accounts that came out of its New York premiere, the two actors solved the portrait problem in opposite ways.

Borisov: giving up the likeness

Borisov has described reaching a dead end with Sutskever a few days before the shoot. He has said that he then remembered the two of them share a birthday, took that as connection enough, and stopped trying to imitate the man. The character on screen is described as inspired by Sutskever, not copied from him.

Painters will recognise the move. A likeness can be accurate and lifeless; a portrait that gives up some accuracy can find the person. By most accounts the decision paid off. The Guardian’s Owen Myers calls Borisov ‘the heartbeat of the film’. In Variety his work has been described as possibly the performance of the year, a character who is hard to warm to at first and who wins the audience as he starts to warn about what is being built. The Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney argues that Borisov’s quiet, thoughtful playing supplies the humanity without which the film would turn bitter.

Garfield: the likeness sharpened

Garfield goes the other way, towards caricature in the old sense of the word: a likeness with the features pushed. Myers calls him ‘brilliantly slimy’ and describes an Altman who ends up as a man with ‘a victim complex’. Other reviewers praise Garfield for holding charm and manipulation in the same face.

The risk in this approach is the one caricature always runs. Myers thinks Garfield plays Altman as ‘more effete than he actually is’, and finds that choice strange, since in his view there are plenty of other reasons to laugh at a technology oligarch. Exaggeration only works when it exaggerates the right thing.

The frame around them

The Guardian’s review suggests the film itself leans the same way as Garfield. Myers describes ‘clangingly obvious visual metaphors’, among them a car accelerating over a foggy Golden Gate Bridge. The score is by Damon Albarn. Mark Rylance appears as Geoffrey Hinton, the scientist the young Sutskever visits in 2003 in the hope of a job, and Monica Barbaro plays Mira Murati. Simon Rich wrote the screenplay.

Guadagnino has said that what interests him is less the technology than the people who own it, a small group with radical control over how society is organised. That is a portraitist’s interest. It also explains why the casting matters more here than in most films about real events: if the faces do not convince, there is nothing else for the argument to stand on.

What London will be looking at

Borisov received an Academy Award nomination for his supporting role in Sean Baker’s Anora. Neon, which distributed that film and now distributes this one, reportedly plans to put him forward as lead actor for Artificial, with Garfield in the supporting category. So the Gala audience will be watching a contest inside the film as well as the one in the story: two methods of playing a living person, side by side.

The festival runs from 7 to 18 October 2026.

Image: Yura Borisov at the Toronto International Film Festival, 2024. Photo: Frank Sun, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

By Sarah Johnson

By Sarah Johnson

Every autumn the BFI London Film Festival gathers most of the attention in British cinema. About an hour north of London by train, another festival with a longer history than most people realise takes over a much smaller city. The 45th Cambridge Film Festival runs from 22 October to 1 November 2026, eleven days of international cinema in a city where you can walk from the station to the screen.

This guide is for the visitor: what the festival is, where it happens and how to plan a few days of it.

A festival in a small city

The Cambridge Film Festival was founded in 1977, which makes it one of the UK’s longest-running film festivals. It is run by the Cambridge Film Trust, a registered charity, and it is a BAFTA- and BIFA-qualifying event, so the films carry weight in the British industry.

What changes when a festival sits in a small city is scale and distance. In London, festival screenings are scattered across the capital and the evening is shaped by travel. In Cambridge the main venue is in the centre, the programme is concentrated, and it is realistic to see two or three films in a day and still have dinner in between. Filmmakers who come for Q&As stay in the same few streets as the audience, and conversations after screenings spill into the foyer rather than onto a platform.

Where it happens

The festival’s home is the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse at 38-39 St Andrew’s Street. The cinema occupies the upper floors of a building that opened as the Regal cinema in 1937; the ground floor is now a pub. From the railway station it is a walk of around twenty minutes through the town centre.

It was not always here. The festival began in the old Arts Cinema in Market Passage, and over the years it has spread to other venues: the Light Cinema, the arts centre The Junction, Sawston Cinema outside the city, local churches and even pedestrianised streets. Until 2019 it held open-air “Movies on the Meadows” screenings on inflatable screens at Grantchester Meadows. Venues beyond the Picturehouse change from year to year, so check the location of each screening when you book.

What is on

The full programme will be published on 30 September on the festival’s website, and tickets are sold there. The organisers have already described its shape: nearly 100 titles from more than 25 countries, including Palme d’Or and Cannes prize-winners, new British films, documentaries and films for younger audiences. More than half of the films are directed by women.

Last year gives a sense of the texture. The 2025 festival opened with Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia, with Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons. It included a live event with the film critic Mark Kermode and a “Cambridge Connections” strand of films with local ties, among them Lost for Words, filmed in Ely. Its audience voted Beautiful Evening, Beautiful Day by Ivona Juka the best fiction feature.

Planning a visit

Choose a weekend, or both. Since 2025 the festival has run across two weekends, a format it had not used since 2015. That makes a long weekend visit easy: the opening weekend of 24-25 October or the closing weekend of 31 October – 1 November, each with the weekdays around them.

Book premieres and Q&As early. Screenings with filmmakers present and UK premieres sell out first. Only films having their UK premiere at the festival can win its audience awards, so the ballot you fill in after those screenings actually counts.

Leave room for the unknown. The festival’s jury prize, the Golden Punt, goes to a discovery feature: in 2025 it was Guillermo Galoe’s Sleepless City. The most memorable film of a festival visit is often one you chose because the time slot suited you.

Look at the older films too. Retrospectives are one of the festival’s oldest traditions. In 1978 it ran a Satyajit Ray retrospective, and in 1994 it showed the Three Colours trilogy with a full Kieślowski season. Whatever the 2026 programme revisits, a restored classic on a cinema screen is something streaming cannot give you.

With children

The festival overlaps with the October half-term in most English schools, and it traditionally includes a family programme. In 2025 there were free family screenings during the half-term week, and the 2026 programme again promises films for younger audiences. Teenagers with a serious interest in film should know about the festival’s Youth Lab, for 16 to 24-year-olds, whose members judge one of the festival’s awards.

Why it is worth the train

A festival in a smaller city is not a smaller version of London. It is a different experience: fewer choices at any given hour, more time with each film, and an audience that is local, loyal and curious. The Cambridge festival has been doing this for almost half a century, through a break of several years after 1996, a return in 2001 and a change from a single long-serving director to a programming panel. It has earned its place in the autumn calendar.

The 45th Cambridge Film Festival runs from 22 October to 1 November 2026. The programme is published on 30 September.

Dates and details are from the Cambridge Film Festival website, checked 11 September 2026. Always check the official site for the final programme and venues.

Image: the audience at the Cambridge Film Festival, October 2018. Photo: Kitsonian / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.