The film itself is four-documentaries-in-one, with documentary heavyweights like Morgan Spurlock and the maker of "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters" each tackling a different subject.
Director Vitaly Mansky spent two years negotiating with the North Korean government over permission to film a documentary in one of the world's most inaccessible countries.
Abed, who has Asperger's syndrome and dreams of making documentaries, is in one sense a familiar sitcom character, the gentle alien observer — like Latka, in "Taxi".
And Mr. Doctorow knew that Mr. Snowden was a fan of his work from watching the documentary "Citizenfour" (in one scene, Mr. Snowden stands in his hotel room next to a table that holds a copy of Mr. Doctorow's novel "Homeland," which features a hacktivist protagonist who is deciding whether to leak incriminating government documents).
The startling admission, made in a conversation with himself in a bathroom while his interview microphone was still switched on, was made public just hours after new evidence unearthed by the documentary-makers in one of the unsolved cases caused Durst to be arrested in New Orleans and charged with first-degree murder.
The premise is fairly straightforward and ticks several primetime documentary requirements in one go: Piers Morgan visits high-security American prisons and speaks to killers or accused killers who are women.
His words, the strongest yet on the subject of his kinghood, are to be broadcast in a documentary on BBC One on Thursday to mark his 70th birthday.
I later worked closely with two other commercial directors who had excellent ideas for documentaries or features — in one case, we shot a great deal of material for projects that didn't crystallize; in another, the filmmaker had written a marvellous script that could have been filmed on a low budget but without the range of amenities to which he was accustomed, and he didn't do it.
The strong suspicion is that any lectures he gives will be in documentaries for one network or another.
It is almost solely in documentaries that one can see Palestinian people and be exposed to their experiences and points of view.
