On Direct Cinema

“Portraying the on-screen lies that betray the truth” is the aim of the Cinéma Vérité movement as originally envisioned by the French anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch. Accepting all film practice as artifice and vindicating the teachings of Dziga Vertov and the kinopravda tradition forty years on, Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morin set up a film experiment by the name of “Chronicle of a summer” (“Chronique d'un été”, France, 1961) as a means to discuss whether or not it is possible to act sincerely in front of a camera. Filming a cast of real life individuals and later showing them the compiled footage to discuss the level of reality that they thought the movie obtained, “Chronicle of a summer” illustrated how both the presence of the camera and Rouch’s own may serve as a catalyst that makes the subjects of the film more self-revealing. Rouch explains:

“The presence of the camera is a kind of passport that opens all doors and makes every kind of scandal possible. The camera deforms, but not from the moment that it becomes an accomplice. At that point it has the possibility of doing something I couldn't do if the camera wasn't there: it becomes a kind of psychoanalytic stimulant, which lets people do things they wouldn't otherwise do.”

As a result, Rouch would endorse the view that film has the power “to reveal, with doubts, a fictional part of all of us, which for me is the most real part of an individual”, highlighting the elusive nature of truth in a medium where reality must constantly be negotiated with its representation. This essay will examine Rouch’s claim with reference to two documentary films within the Cinéma Vérité framework, Frederick Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies” (USA, 1967) and Abbas Kiarostami’s “Homework” (“Mashq-e Shab”, Iran, 1989), additionally assessing whether documentaries force their subjects to “act up” in front of the camera. We must, however, look into the idiosyncrasies of the Cinéma Vérité movement first.

Documentary experienced one of its major revolutions during the 1960s with the advent of lightweight 16mm cameras and portable sound recorders. Replacing the awkward and virtually immobile 35mm cameras and oversized tape recorders used up until then for more manageable equipment, practitioners were suddenly able to shoot with an ease of access and immediacy they could never have dreamt of before. At the same time, the increased speed of the new 16mm stocks meant that less light was required in order to obtain an acceptable image, so film lights could be dispensed with, and most situations filmed in natural, available light . This facilitated spontaneity and freedom in filming that paved the way for a new aesthetic in film identified by the many adjectives that have become common currency in documentary today: rough, grainy, hand-held , on location.

Accommodating values from the Italian Neo-realist movement and kinopravda credentials , the European materialization of this new aesthetic took the name of Cinéma Vérité (literally Film Truth) and was championed by Rouch and Morin, their interpretation of film typically involving active interviews and interventions by the filmmakers, thus embracing the distorting effect that the presence of the camera has on the reality which it is trying to capture. Rouch comments on:

“(…) When you have a microphone and when you have a camera aimed at people, there is, all of a sudden, a phenomenon that takes place because people are being recorded: they behave very differently than they would if they were not being recorded. But what has always seemed very strange to me is that, contrary to what one might think, when people are being recorded, the reactions that they have are always more sincere than those they have when they are not being recorded. The fact of being recorded gives these people a public.”

Across the Atlantic, however, Rouch’s invitation for his subjects to act up their deepest inner-selves would be frowned upon, as a parallel development in Cinéma Vérité aesthetics took place: Direct Cinema .

Led by Richard Leacock, Robert Drew, Donn A. Pennebaker, Albert and David Maysles and Frederick Wiseman, the American schism was more concerned with the recording of events in which the subject and audience become unaware of the camera's presence. Furthermore, they would also find the term Cinéma Vérité too pretentious, adhering instead to the label Direct Cinema . Arguing for an observational, objective, “fly on the wall” approach that does not modify the action being filmed, Leacock would sum up Direct Cinema’s differences in belief with Rouch’s as follows:

“We find that the degree to which the camera changes the situation is mostly due to the nature of the person filming it. You can make your presence known, or you can act in such a way as not to affect them. Also, of course, it depends on the intensity of what’s happening to them. But we don’t think that it affects people very much, at least I don’t. Let me add that, of course, it affects them in Jean Rouch’s films, since the only thing that’s happening to them is the fact that they’re being filmed. There’s nothing else to think about. How can they ever forget it?”


However, in spite of parting with the Europeans over the questions of filmmaker interference and branding, both schools of thought would ultimately come to represent faces of the same coin, the terms often used interchangeably to refer to an understanding of the documentary practice indebted with “the real” and “the truth”. In Bill Nichol’s view, a truth understood inevitably as “the truth of an encounter rather than the absolute or untampered truth” and subject to the politics of epistemology and representation - the minimized encounter of the Direct Cinema approach still an encounter, and its objectivity a chimera, for documentary is not just about recording what is there, but also about perspective, interpretation of the facts and narrative; about selecting, presenting and editing. Nichols annotates:

“We see how the filmmaker and subject negotiate a relationship, how they act toward one another, what forms of power and control come into play, and what levels of revelation or rapport stem from this specific form of encounter.”

This is an argument also posited throughout theoretician Stella Bruzzi’s work. Bruzzi comments on:

“Documentaries are a negotiation between filmmaker and reality, and at heart performance (…) The traditional concept of documentary as striving to represent reality as faithfully as possible is predicated upon the realist assumption that the production process must be disguised, as was the case with Direct Cinema. Conversely, [new performative] documentaries herald a different notion of documentary truth that acknowledges the construction and artificiality of even the non fiction film.”

So how do we work around the inevitable falsification or subjectification such representation entails ? Nichols elaborates:

“[Documentary] makes the stuff of social reality visible and audible in a distinctive way, according to the acts of selection and arrangement carried out by the filmmaker. It gives a sense of what we understand reality itself to have been, or what it is now, or of what it may become. Documentary films also convey truths if we decide they do.”


It is therefore up to us to assess documentary claims and assertions. Nichols suggests that the "truth" of a film can be understood in many ways, categorizing how reality is being negotiated in different modes, a relatively wide spectrum of methods that he defines as “basic ways of organizing texts in relation to certain recurrent features or conventions” that may help us asses whether the truths conveyed are worthy of our belief. It would be useful to review briefly what these conventions imply.

Nichols distinguishes six modes of representation around which most documentary texts are structured: poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflexive and performative. The poetic mode stresses mood, tone, and affect much more than displays of knowledge or acts of persuasion, and opens up the possibility of alternative forms of knowledge to the straightforward transfer of information, the prosecution of particular arguments or points of view, or the presentation of reasoned propositions about problems in need of solution. Usually associated with the 1920s and Modernism, examples of this mode can be found in Joris Ivens’s “Rain” (“Regen”, Netherlands, 1929), but also in more recent films like Chris Marker’s “Sans Soleil” (France, 1982).

The expository documentary mode arises from the dissatisfaction with the distracting, entertainment qualities of the fiction film, emphasizing the impression of objectivity and judgment. Characteristically mediated by a voice-of-God narration and the use of images as illustration, this mode seeks to disclose information about the historical world itself and to see that world afresh, yet through methods that may seem over didactic. This type of documentary is best represented by the works of Grierson and Flaherty (e.g. “Industrial Britain”, England, 1931), where editing serves to establish and maintain rhetorical continuity more than spatial or temporal continuity, but also by Luis Buñuel’s “Land without Bread” (“Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan”, Spain, 1933), where counterpoint, irony, satire and strange juxtapositions serve to establish new metaphors that the filmmaker wishes to propose.

Observational documentary arises both from the availability of mobile cameras and lighter sound equipment and dissatisfaction with the moralizing quality of the expository documentary. Observational filmmakers aim to record inconspicuously what people do when they are not explicitly addressing the camera, thus leaving the social actors free to act and the documentaries free to record without interacting with one another. On the other hand, this requires a disciplined detachment from the events being filmed and restricts the filmmaker to the present moment. We find examples of this approach in the works of Leacock-Pennebaker (“Don’t look back”, USA, 1967), Maysles brothers (“Salesman”, USA, 1968) and Frederick Wiseman’s (“Titicut Follies”, USA, 1967)

Participatory documentary, also referred to as interactive documentary, also arises from the availability of mobile equipment, but expresses a desire to make the filmmaker’s perspective more evident. Documentarists engage with the individuals and situations being filmed directly, while not reverting to classic exposition. Interview styles and interventionist tactics arise, allowing the filmmaker to participate more actively in present events. Representative of this mode are the films of Jean Rouch (“Chronicle of a summer”, France, 1961) and Nick Broomfield (“Kurt & Courtney”, UK, 1998)

Reflexive documentary, the most self-aware of modes, questions the very documentary form, engaging actively with the issues of realism and representation, using the same devices as other documentaries but setting them on edge so that the viewer’s attention is drawn to the devices as well as the effect. Examples of this approach can be found in Dziga Vertov’s “Man with the movie camera” (USSR, 1929) and Errol Morris’ “The thin blue line” (USA, 1988)

Finally, the performative mode is defined by the desire to stress the subjective aspects of a classically objective discourse. Like the poetic mode, the performative mode raises questions about what is knowledge. What counts as understanding? What besides factual information goes into our understanding of the world? Nichols argues that performative documentaries primarily address us emotionally rather than pointing us to the factual world we hold in common , acknowledging the subjective aspects of documentary, like Alain Resnais’ “Night and Fog” (“Nuit et brouillard”, France, 1955) With a commentary by Holocaust survivor Jean Cayrol, “Night and Fog” is not a historical account of the Holocaust but instead a subjective account of it.

However, Nichols also reminds us that, although this short summary may give the impression of a linear chronology or even an implicit evolution toward greater complexity and self-awareness, these modes have all been present from early in the history of documentary. Moreover, they often coexist or tend to be combined and altered within individual films. Let us now return to the question that opens this paper and contextualize Rouch’s claim in light of these categorizations, assessing how it may apply to two specific examples representative of differing views within the documentary mode spectrum: Frederick Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies” and Abbas Kiarostami’s “Homework”.

Frederick Wiseman’s 1967 observational documentary “Titicut Follies” is a stark and graphic exposé of the conditions that existed at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, Massachusetts. As an instructor in criminal law, Wiseman had taken his students to Bridgwater, and he says the idea for the film came from the shock of what he saw. The film, the first in a series about American institutional life, documents the various ways the inmates are treated by the guards, social workers and psychiatrists .

Wiseman’s style is non-interventionist. Like Leacock, whenever unable to adopt the fly-on-the-wall etiquette of Direct Cinema, Wiseman disagrees with Rouch over the effects the presence of the camera may have on the reality being filmed, arguing that people do not significantly alter their behaviour for the camera, and that “if they are at all made self-conscious by its presence, they will tend to fall back on a behaviour that is comfortable ‘rather than increase the discomfort by trying out new roles’” . Rejecting Rouch’s belief that documentary may somehow persuade its subjects to ‘act up’ in front of the camera, Wiseman’s observational approach, seemingly that of the uninvolved onlooker, certainly honours its Direct Cinema credentials: the role of the camera in “Titicut Follies” is overtly detached, inconspicuous, scientific .

Framed by scenes of the annual variety show organized and performed by the staff and inmates at Bridgewater (people do perform in this instance, but that does not necessarily invalidate the observational method), the film documents a series of activities and procedures at the prison, including psychiatric interviews and hearings, the force-feeding of an inmate who refuses to eat, daily routines such as strip searches, bathing and shaving, a birthday party and a funeral.

Rejecting didacticism, the opening titles in “Titicut Follies” give us little indication as to what the subject will be. Without a narrator or voice-over to guide us thru the material, we are forced to find the structural logic of the film by ourselves. This open style of observational filmmaking where the viewers are left to contemplate the film and its implications without a defined perspective has led to some criticism. Rouch dismisses Wiseman’s unwillingness to push his point of view:

“I would like [Wiseman] to say something, say what the thesis is (…) In “Titicut Follies” there isn’t any [guiding hand], it’s a certified report, which could perhaps be interpreted as a cynical and sadomasochistic report.”

But yet, appearances can certainly be deceiving. The film is carefully edited and structured to advance its maker’s thesis. Wiseman spent approximately six weeks shooting on location, but eleven months in the cutting room shaping his material. Peter Mathews comments on Wiseman’s approach:

“While there’s a powerful illusion of objectivity, the material has in fact been shrewdly selected and slanted to make an anti-authoritarian case. It isn’t so far removed from Grierson’s didacticism.”

Furthermore, the role of the camera may transcend Wiseman’s expectations, proving Rouch’s claim right on a number of occasions: “The guard holding the inmate as he is being force-fed looks directly at the camera as if to indicate ‘What can I do?’” ; An elderly man sings “Chinatown, My Chinatown” and other inmates play trombones or perform explicitly for the film crew; Likewise, the camera follows a naked ex-schoolteacher (Jim) into his cell. Aware of the camera’s presence and trying to cover his genitals with his hands, Jim’s returns the camera’s direct gaze by holding his and we become painfully aware of the camera’s intrusive nature; Similarly, a young inmate (Vladimir), lucidly arguing that he came to Bridgewater “for observation”, often takes advantage of the filming to state his case, frequently saying “I want to say this to camera”. Aware that his reproduction on celluloid was something valuable to the filmmaker, he would refuse to sign a release form until portions of the film were shown to members of the federal government or until his deportation out of America and back to another country arranged.

Do these subjects act up for the camera? Perhaps we could only conclude that “[Brigdewater’s] inmates are forever on stage” .

Constructed almost exclusively from intimidating one to one pupil interviews about the state of their homework, Abbas Kiarostami’s 1989 documentary “Homework” is reminiscent of Rouch, developing from the premise that “we can never get close to the truth except through lying.” Peter Matthews annotates:

“The inaugural fiction is the director's own, and entails a cunning manipulation of the action. In the nature of an experiment, Chronicle of a Summer sets up and choreographs an artificial situation wherein hand-picked strangers are brought together and made to interact with Rouch, his accomplice Edgar Morin and each other (…) Kiarostami gambles for similar high stakes in Homework.”

According to Kiarostami, Homework is not a film, but rather a filmed inquiry motivated by the Iranian educational problems his own children brought home every night from school. A group of small boys on the way to school, overtly curious about the camera Kiarostami makes no effort to hide, approach him; The headmaster of the school where he wants to film asks him what the film is about:

“The film is just based on an impression. I thought to get the camera over here to do some observation; We are going to find about other parents, other children and their views; I’d rather say it’s not a movie in the usual sense, it’s a research work. It’s a pictorial research on student’s homework.”


Kiarostami adds: "But you can't tell until the film's made", in Matthew’s view, a pledge that Homework won't deliver sure answers so much as pose questions - and by this means, sneak up on some truth. To some extent, the truth and lies of a society and its educational system that claim to teach the students but in reality bullies and brutalizes them.

The initial exterior shots transition into a cell like room, where we see the camera crew setting up to roll. Like Vertov and film-truth, Kiarostami bares the filmmaking devices and makes us conscious of the mechanisms at work within the film. This leads to the film interviews: Backs to the wall, framed in harshly lit close ups, visibly ill-treated children face both Kiarostami’s and the camera’s unsympathetic, freezing, blank stare: “Have you done your homework? Why don’t you do your homework on time?” Matthews comments on:

“The questions he asks each child are elementary, almost trite; but if they suggest at the outset a catechism for toddlers, they end up resembling an inquisition. We hear the same monotonous litany of excuses: teachers pile on an impossibly heavy load, siblings are unavailable to help, mothers are busy cooking, fathers are illiterate. Behind the children's inarticulate apologies, we can read a whole culture of oppression where adults, themselves ground down by overwork, worry and powerlessness, visit their frustrations on the lowest in the pecking order.”

“Do you prefer cartoons or homework?” Identifying Kiarostami with the authorities - teachers, parents, siblings - that brutalize them, they all answer what they believe is expected of them: “homework”. Only then we begin to grasp the truth concealed by the weight of such lie.

© Jose M Barea Velazquez, May 2007

After Peter Matthews, “A little learning” (BFI Sight and Sound, June 2002)

Rouch shares Vertov’s belief that the camera is able to reveal deeper levels of truth about the world than the “imperfect human eye”. In his own words, “I’m one of the people responsible for this phrase [Cinéma Vérité] and it’s really in homage to Dziga Vertov, who completely invented the kind of film we do today. It was a cinema of lies, but he believed simply – and I agree with him – that the camera eye is more perspicacious and more accurate than the human eye. The camera eye has an infallible memory, and the filmmaker’s eye is a multiple one, divided…” (Jean Rouch interviewed by G. Roy-Leven in 1969, Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins, “Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary”, Faber and Faber Ltd., 1998, p. 265)

G. Roy Levin, “Documentary explorations; 15 interviews with film-makers” (1st ed.), Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1971, p.136
After Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins’, “Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary”, Faber and Faber Ltd., 1998, p. 249 (“The Grain of Truth”)

Rouch annotates: “…the last piece of good luck I had was when I made my first films about Nigeria. I left with an amateur cameraman’s manual, and I had the good luck to lose my tripod at the end of a week, and was forced to work without a tripod.” (Jean Rouch interviewed by G. Roy-Leven in 1969, Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins, “Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary”, Faber and Faber Ltd., 1998, p. 264)

The French New Wave, and indeed, the Cinéma Vérité movement, celebrated both Vertov’s teachings and Italian Neorealism of the 1940s, incorporating much of them into their own movement: filming distinctly with non-professional actors, shooting almost exclusively on location, its directors ever keen to take their handheld cameras into the streets in an attempt to explore and experiment with the medium and find their stories in the lives of ordinary people and portrait “life as it is”.
Jean Rouch interviewed by James Blue, from Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins’, “Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary”, Faber and Faber Ltd., 1998, p. 268 (“The Grain of Truth”)

To this day, Cinéma Vérité has taken on several names worldwide: Uncontrolled Cinema, Observational Cinema, or Direct Cinema. However, I will argue that all of these terms are interchangeable in practice, as they all share a common ground of "truth" and are the by-product of the same major advancements in technology. Moreover, their different filming modes often coexist, overlap or are combined and altered within individual films.
Formally though, it has become common practice to use Cinema Verite (no italics or accent marks) as the covering term for these many variants, Direct Cinema as the somewhat narrower term usually used to refer only to the Anglo-Canadian-American manifestation of the movement.

All of them significantly credited in Richard Leacock’s “Primary" (USA, 1960), a portrait the 1960 primary election between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey for the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States. Produced by Robert Drew, shot by Leacock himself and Albert Maysles, and edited by D. A. Pennebaker, the film is yet another breakthrough in documentary film style and established what has since become the standard style of video reporting through the use of mobile cameras and lighter sound equipment, obtaining greater intimacy than was ever possible with the older, more classical techniques of documentary filmmaking.

It is worth noting that, ironically, in a letter of application to the Fifth International Film Festival, Wiseman described “Titicut Follies” (USA, 1967) as done “in the Cinéma Vérité” style. (26 April 1967, exhibit 44 in Commonwealth v. Wiseman, as quoted in Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson's, “Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman”, Southern Illinois University Press, 1989, p.329)

Richard Leacock interviewed by Mark Shivas in March 1963 for RTF (Radio Television Fraçaise), as quoted in Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins’, “Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary”, Faber and Faber Ltd., 1998, p. 254 (“The Grain of Truth”)

Bill Nichols, “Introduction to Documentary” (Indiana University Press, 2001. p. 118)

Bill Nichols, “Introduction to Documentary” (Indiana University Press, 2001. p. 118)

Stella Bruzzi, "New documentary: a critical introduction" (Routledge, London, 2000. p.186)

After Stella Bruzzi’s "New documentary: a critical introduction" (Routledge, London, 2000. p.187)

Bill Nichols, “Introduction to documentary” (Indiana University Press, 2001)

Bill Nichols, “Representing Reality” (Indiana University Press, 1991. p. 32)
Bill Nichols, “Introduction to Documentary” (Indiana University Press, 2001. p. 132)
The film's release was banned outside of the field of education in the United States from 1967-1992 by a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruling that, since it was filmed in a hospital, it violated the patients' rights to privacy. The polemics around this are unfortunately out of the scope of this paper. On the subject, I recommend Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson’s “Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman”, Southern Illinois University Press, 1989, chapter 2: “Documentary dilemmas: the trials of Titicut Follies.”

After Barry Keith and Jeannette Sloniowski's “Documenting the Documentary”, Wayne State University Press, 1998, p. 242 (“Ethnography in the first person”, by Barry Keith Grant; quote from interview with Barry Keith Grant)

Wiseman himself regards his own documentaries as a “natural history of the way we live”(as quoted in Frederick Wiseman and Barry Keith Grant’s “5 Films by Frederick Wiseman”, University of California Press, 2006, p.3, after David Eame’s “Watching Wiseman Watch”, New York Time Magazine, October 2, 1977, p.97); His choice of cameraman and co-director for “Titicut Follies”, ethnographic filmmaker John Marshall, helps defining Wiseman’s approach to Bridgewater to some extent as that of a detached anthropologist.
Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson, “Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman”, Southern Illinois University Press, 1989, p.35 (After G. Roy Levin, “Documentary explorations; 15 interviews with film-makers” (1st ed.), Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1971, p.141-142)

Peter Matthews, “A little learning” (BFI Sight and Sound, June 2002)

After Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson’s “Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman”, Southern Illinois University Press, 1989, p.40

Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson, “Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman”, Southern Illinois University Press, 1989, p.24

Barry Keith and Jeannette Sloniowski, “Documenting the Documentary”, Wayne State University Press, 1998, p. 243 (“Ethnography in the first person”, by Barry Keith Grant; quote from interview with Barry Keith Grant)

Kiarostami has said: "My son is critical that I keep lying to people (...) in cinema, by fabricating lies we may never reach the fundamental truth, but we will always be on our way to it. We can never get close to the truth except through lying."

“A little learning” (BFI Sight and Sound, June 2002)
“A little learning” (BFI Sight and Sound, June 2002)

Bibliography

• Bill Nichols, “Representing Reality” (Indiana University Press, 1991)
• Bill Nichols, “Introduction to Documentary” (Indiana University Press, 2001)
• Stella Bruzzi, "New documentary: a critical introduction" (Routledge, London, 2000)
• Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson, “Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman” (Southern Illinois University Press, 1989)
• Barry Keith and Jeannette Sloniowski, “Documenting the Documentary” (Wayne State University Press, 1998)
• Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins, “Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary” (Faber and Faber Ltd., 1998)
• G. Roy Levin, “Documentary explorations: 15 interviews with film-makers” (Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1971)
• Frederick Wiseman and Barry Keith Grant, “5 Films by Frederick Wiseman” (University of California Press, 2006)
• Peter Matthews, “A little learning” (BFI Sight and Sound, June 2002)

Selected Filmography

• Dziga Vertov, “Chelovek s kinoapparatom” (AKA “The Man With The Movie Camera”. USSR, 1929)
• Luis Buñuel, “Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan” (AKA “Land without bread”. Spain, 1933)
• Roberto Rossellini, “Roma, città aperta” (AKA “Roma, open city”. Italy, 1945)
• Vittorio de Sica, “Ladri di biciclette” (AKA “Bicycle Thieves”. Italy, 1948)
• Alain Resnais, “Nuit et brouillard” (AKA “Night and Fog”, France, 1955)
• Richard Leacock, “Primary” (USA, 1960)
• Edgar Morin, Jean Rouch, “Chronique d'un été” (AKA “Chronicle of a Summer”. France, 1961)
• Frederick Wiseman, “Titicut Follies” (USA, 1967)
• Albert Maysles & David Maysles, “Salesman” (USA, 1969)
• Albert Maysles, David Maysles & Charlotte Zwerin, “Gimmie Shelter” (USA, 1970)
• Chris Marker, “Sans soleil” (France, 1983)
• Abbas Kiarostami, “Khaneh-ye dust kojast?” (AKA “Where is the friend’s house?”. Iran, 1987)
• Errol Morris, “The thin blue line” (USA, 1988)
• Abbas Kiarostami, “Mashq-e Shab” (AKA “Homework”. Iran, 1989)
• Nick Broomfield, “Kurt & Courtney” (UK, 1998)