A one-off documentary such as Blackfish, or a series like Netflix's Making a Murderer shows that documentaries can prompt change and provoke debate on a huge scale.
I know the classics such as Jonathan Demme's Talking Heads film, Stop Making Sense, but I'm more familiar with those that merge musical performance and documentary, such as Penelope Spheeris's The Decline of the Western Civilization, Part Two: The Metal Years – which is incredibly funny, affectionate and sad.
In fact, even appearing as a "celebrity" in a documentary such as this bespeaks a desperation of a professional rather than practical kind (there are ways to investigate poverty without turning to the AK-47 of fleeting and synthetic empathy, reality TV), and that is only its first offence.
While a documentary such as My Architect may tell you a lot about the inner life of the son of an architect, it does not reveal much about architecture, perhaps because it was architecture that ultimately deprived Nathaniel Kahn of his father, Louis.
Once upon a time, a timely and provocative political documentary such as Michael Winterbottom's film of Naomi Klein's book, The Shock Doctrine, could count on a theatrical release in, at minimum, Manhattan.
Of course, the Graffiti, DJing and Poetry covered in that film have become the global lingua franca, and one of our city's greatest exports, and screening a crucial documentary such as Style Wars seems a proper chest-thumping for our city, during this festival's 50th anniversary, but that's just my opinion.
I also like documentaries such as Wild China.
Dawn continued: "And we also have epic sporting documentaries such as Senna.
Dogwoof distribute social-issue films and documentaries such as The Age of Stupid, GasLand and The Interrupters.
From documentaries such as Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 to plays like Tim Robbins's Embedded, the entertainment industry has taken sides.
"Eco-documentaries are a reflection of that"."The End of the Line" uses the same lyrical underwater footage as nature documentaries, such as "The Blue Planet".
