The Story of Documentary Film - The 1970s

Documentary is thought of as a genre of cinema, like the gangster movie or superhero films, but it’s much more than that. Half of all films ever made have been documentary and so it is half of cinema, a multi-verse, a range of genres. There are observational films, campaigning movies, portrait docs, archive-based films, personal essays, music films, journey documentaries, experimental and animated non-fiction cinema. In THE STORY OF DOCUMENTARY FILM we encounter all of these: this is the story of what happened in the last twelve decades. Spanning 16 hours in 16 chapters, this epic documentary traces the global evolution of nonfiction film, revealing the filmmakers who discovered, innovated, and shaped documentary cinema into a dynamic lens for life.