Anastasia Douka, Stella Dimitrakopoulou, Orestis Mavroudis: Redefining a Documentary Practice

Essay By Jacob Moe

On February 8, 1926, filmmaker John Grierson reviewed Robert J. Flaherty’s Moana, an early docufiction film shot on the Samoan island of Savai’i, in the New York Sun. “Being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth and his family, [the film] has documentary value,”[1] he declared. This phrase is often cited as the first usage of the term “documentary” in relation to a filmic work, and has since then been most closely associated…