Of late, there is a growing trend to make documentaries, which look fiction films and the fiction films which look like documentaries. At times it becomes difficult to decipher whether you are watching a fiction or a non-fiction film. Recently I watched a film in MAMI , which weaved in an emotional story into a film which was talking about Artificial Intelligence. While the filmmakers have their own reasons for doing so, the critics are dived on the issue. One of the arguments given by the purists is that if the non-fiction films are determined to look , feel and move like fiction films , what’s the point in making non-fiction films ?

The earliest non-fiction films sought to present reality in its rawest form. The Lumière Brothers’ Workers Leaving the Factory (1895) and Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895) are among the first examples of capturing real-life events without manipulation. Filmmakers like Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North, 1922) and Dziga Vertov (Man with a Movie Camera, 1929) were pioneers in the documentary movement. While Flaherty’s work had a slight narrative structure, Vertov strongly believed in an unfiltered representation of life through cinema verite—a style dedicated to capturing unscripted reality.