For the month of August, we'll be running a series of interviews I've done over the years with documentary filmmakers.

In the OTEM office, the producers have been referring to this collection as Bob's Docs.

Over the next few weeks, we'll go through some tropes of documentary filmmaking,

from prurients to access to the personal journey.

But we'll start with the deadly sin of manipulation.

That's the sound of the film, Winged Migration, a documentary that followed migratory birds.

The film would lead you to believe that we were seeing those birds in the wild.

But despite the title and the footage, all is not as it seems to be.

We'll be returning to that a little later.

But who ensures that films hew close to the reality they claim to depict?

In the documentary world, it's individual filmmakers working alone without a clear rulebook and with only their consciences as their guides.

A few years back, I spoke with Patricia Alftar Haida,

a professor at American University Center for Social Media,

who told me that this approach

leads to a kind of slippery slope.

When the Civil Rights Documentary Mighty Times was produced, there was a whole segment of supposedly

archival footage that was actually reenacted. There's a film called Bananas about the

dull company's poor treatment of workers in Guatemala.

And one of the lead characters in there turns out to not be what he claimed to be and to have given erroneous information.

When those ethical breaches came to light, it caused a minor scandal in the documentary world,

and the suspicion that there had to be many more such breaches spooked the documentary community

into creating its own ethical standards and practices.

...