Teaching Documentary Film as Research-Creation: Challenges and Possibilities

Drawing on over ten years of experience teaching in the MFA Program in Documentary Media at Toronto Metropolitan University, I will try to address the complex reality of doing research-creation within the academy for the emerging documentary filmmakers in the program. The main premise of this paper is that documentary film and research-creation are very similar because, as a rule, research is at the heart of every documentary project: the essence of a documentary project is that it begins in critical observation and analysis and ends in story. Like academic research every documentary (student) project usually begins as an idea, a hypothesis, or a series of questions: its beginnings are in research, and the critical thinking therein. But this is not a given, or the same, for every student.