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Over the past two decades, opportunities for 'creative documentary' on television may have diminished, but other distribution options for innovative and engaged films have opened up. A resurgence of cinematic documentary is attracting substantial numbers of viewers who, bored or disillusioned by television's shift to reality programming, are prepared to pay for theatre tickets, while online subscription services such as Netflix and Amazon now stream and fund high-quality documentary. Increasing numbers of filmmakers are self-distributing their works online. A significant percentage of these films, freed from the constraints of broadcast television, take up political challenges because, as Michael Chanan says, documentary has 'politics in its genes' (2008, p. 16). In fact, as mainstream news and current affairs becomes increasingly tabloid, it could be argued that documentary is assuming the role of investigative journalism or, to use Laura Poitras' description, documentary functions as 'Journalism Plus'. This article, at times drawing on my own film practice, attempts to explore these shifts and developments, locating documentary at a time of institutional transformation. Keywords: documentary, human rights, journalism, New Zealand, politics, postdocumentary, AS a working documentary filmmaker and an academic, I have had the opportunity to step back and critically analyse my own practice in a detached manner, approaching my own film [...]

An overview of the films, which feature the music of Simon and Garfunkel, is presented. Their poem 'The Dangling Conversation', also featured in the films, is mainly focused on.

Over the past two decades, opportunities for 'creative documentary' on television may have diminished, but other distribution options for innovative and engaged films have opened up. A resurgence of cinematic documentary is attracting substantial numbers of viewers who, bored or disillusioned by television's shift to reality programming, are prepared to pay for theatre tickets, while online subscription services such as Netflix and Amazon now stream and fund high-quality documentary. Increasing numbers of filmmakers are self-distributing their works online. A significant percentage of these films, freed from the constraints of broadcast television, take up political challenges because, as Michael Chanan says, documentary has 'politics in its genes' (2008, p. 16). In fact, as mainstream news and current affairs becomes increasingly tabloid, it could be argued that documentary is assuming the role of investigative journalism or, to use Laura Poitras' description, documentary functions as 'Journalism Plus'. This article, at times drawing on my own film practice, attempts to explore these shifts and developments, locating documentary at a time of institutional transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how a range of modalities of testimony can emerge from the narrative and aesthetic qualities of documentary and is shaped by the production process. Drawing on my experience of making Brother Number One (2011), this article challenges the generalized understanding that testimony is primarily transmitted through ‘talking heads’. The documentary follows Kiwi Rob Hamill to Cambodia where he attends the war crimes tribunal, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), which is currently underway in Phnom Penh trying former Khmer Rouge leaders for their genocidal policies of the mid- to late-1970s. Rob is a ‘civil party’ at the tribunal, where he describes the suffering his family underwent after his oldest brother, sailor Kerry Hamill was tortured and murdered by the regime, one of the few Westerners killed. I distinguish a range of modalities of testimony within the film: ‘formal’, ‘informal’, ‘interactive’, ‘spontaneous’, and ‘emotion as testimony’. Rob Hamill not only testifies himself through multiple modalities but also, through his presence, elicits testimony from the Cambodian survivors he meets. Moreover, when Rob interacts with survivors on-screen, the empathetic flow between the two parties engages Western viewers, bringing them into greater proximity to the Cambodian subjects from whom they otherwise would feel more distant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on the Indonesian feature documentary film "Punitive Damage." Historical background of the film; Structure of the film; Use of strategic realism in the film; Reasons behind the classification of the film as a human rights documentary.