A Do-umentary Film

I just coined a word (with the help of a typo) to describe the kind of film Good Virus is.

Most documentaries bring awareness to a problem or let us know about an interesting person, event, place or thing.

I think that is what documentaries were supposed to do, present their subject in an objective manner.

But increasongly documentary films have been getting less and objective, presenting the filmakers point of view as well. Often used to incite or anger people into taking action. Think Bowling For Columbine, The Cove and An Inconvienient Truth.

While I am conflicted as to if this is really a good thing – I do not belive that films of this type present the TRUTH as much as they present a VERSION of the truth – as a filmmaker, I find this type of film much more interesting to make.

My one criticism is (and don’t get me wrong, I think the aforementioned films are excellent films) that pretty much all of the films I’ve seen present the problem with out spending a lot of time on the solution. So with Good Virus I have flipped that paradigm and made it all about the solution. Hence the term do-umentary. The people we interview talk almost exclusively about solutions.