By Mani Mehrvarz | November 2026
eenactment has been part of documentary cinema since the genre's earliest days. Even Nanook of the North (1922) included scenes staged by Robert Flaherty. Yet with the growing influence of documentary journalism, audiences have increasingly been encouraged to believe that documentaries present the whole truth. But do they? Perhaps a better question is: What is truth?
Werner Herzog has spent much of his career questioning the relationship between facts, reality, and truth. In his book The Future of Truth, he challenges the idea that simply recording what happens in front of a camera is enough to reveal the truth. After all, the camera is already interpreting reality through its lens, framing, and technical limitations. What reaches the audience is an image of reality, shaped further by the filmmaker's decisions.
Cinema history offers plenty of examples of filmmakers questioning this relationship. Orson Welles played with authenticity and deception in F for Fake (1973). Abbas Kiarostami invited real people to reenact their own experiences in Close-Up (1990), while Clio Barnard used actors to lip-sync recorded interviews in The Arbor (2010). Sarah Polley reconstructed family memories in Stories We Tell (2012), and Joshua Oppenheimer asked perpetrators of mass killings to reenact their crimes in The Act of Killing (2012). These films use very different approaches, but each questions what we accept as documentary evidence.
More recently, You Can See Everything (2026) has brought this discussion back into the spotlight. Nathan Fielder's deliberately awkward performance may have attracted audiences to theaters, but I believe he and co-director Lance Oppenheim knew exactly what they were exploring. I'm not interested in arguing which film or approach is better. This is hardly the first time, and certainly won't be the last, that documentary cinema has moved beyond conventional observation.
One of the most beautiful recent examples, for me, is Four Daughters (2023) by Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania. The film follows Olfa Hamrouni and her daughters, two of whom joined ISIS. Ben Hania brings professional actresses into the family to portray the absent daughters and, at times, Olfa herself. From the opening scenes, we watch actresses preparing in front of mirrors, applying makeup and trying to resemble the women whose lives they are about to portray. The film makes no attempt to conceal this process.
Some of the most fascinating moments occur when the real family members guide the actresses, correcting their gestures or directing them toward what they remember. The reenactment becomes a way of confronting painful experiences, making an already heartbreaking story even more difficult to watch. The cinematography is beautiful, but what stays with me most are the women in the frame. Their faces, their presence, and the trauma they must continue living with. I consider Four Daughters one of the finest documentaries of recent years.
Of course, reenactment doesn't automatically make a film more truthful, just as observational footage doesn't guarantee honesty. A filmmaker can record an event exactly as it happens and still misrepresent it through framing or editing. The responsibility lies in how the filmmaker approaches the people and events being represented.
Perhaps we've spent too much time asking whether what we see in a documentary really happened in front of the camera. The more interesting question is what the film reveals about that experience. The camera encounters reality, but it cannot deliver reality itself. What we see is always a representation, and the truth of that representation depends on much more than whether the scene was staged.
