Character-Driven – Film Festival Documentary

Character and Author

Inserting the filmmaker into the character-driven film.

How the stand-in figure can work.

A common variation on the character-driven doc

Thinking through Naficy’s model for documentary.

Thinking about how popular documentary can adapt to the festival film – or vice versa.

The value in repetition.

Interrogating the idea of the quirkumentary

Revisiting 70s film theory.

Documentaries allegorize transnational spectatorship in surprising ways.

Are certain directorial choices of framing foreign to documentary?

The conceptual dimension of ubiquitous filmmaking decisions.

Valuing films that follow genre conventions and follow them well.

Documentaries that switch tone or mode half-way through.

Further thoughts on variations on the character-driven format.

The character-driven documentary is one of the dominant forms of documentary today, in the US and internationally.