Documentary is a word that carries with it the weight of social-issue, historical, and activist cinema. But nonfiction storytelling isn’t limited to these genres; indeed, more and more businesses and brands are turning to documentary content for marketing purposes, having realized that true stories have the power to advertise, engage, and inspire.

This new role for documentary—using it in the nonprofit, commercial, and corporate spaces—is fresh enough that it doesn’t have a settled name. Depending on who you talk to, you might hear phrases like multimedia storytelling, branded documentary, or nonfiction advertising.

Whatever you want to call it, we’re talking about telling true stories to achieve an objective. Here, we highlight powerful campaigns for three Fortune 500 companies....

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Kristen and Ben got back from Hot Docs last week, where our film Sanjiban screened. After 10 days taking in the best nonfiction storytelling on the planet, we particularly recommend the following films.

The Impostor

Ben: Three years after a fair-skinned, blue-eyed boy disappears from a small Texas town, a brown-eyed man with a thick accent surfaces in Spain and convinces the boy’s family that he is their son. The Impostor was by far the most gripping film I saw at Hot Docs; paced like a Hollywood thriller, it is technically flawless and pushes the envelope of the documentary form in a way that I can only describe as delightful.
Official site • Directed by Bart Layton

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Canned Dreams

Kristen: I thought this film tracking the production of a can of ravioli, featuring interesting...

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Our award-winning short film Sanjiban is now available for your viewing pleasure at sanjibanthefilm.com. Check it out, and vote for us to win in the International Documentary Challenge’s Audience Award!

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Synopsis:

After his diagnosis with terminal cancer, eccentric filmmaker Sanjiban Sellew spent his final days at home with family and friends. Choosing to be as open with death as he was with life, he narrated on camera the extraordinary changes happening to him: “I feel myself becoming less of a human being daily, by the cancer in my brain that’s still chomping away at my electronics, my circuit boards.” After two and a half months, he died at home in rural Massachusetts.

This short documentary takes place in the space and time between the end of one journey, and the beginning...

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UPDATE: Sanjiban is now available online at the Doc Challenge screening room.

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We are delighted to announce that our new film Sanjiban has been selected as a finalist in the International Documentary Challenge and will premiere at Hot Docs in Toronto, Canada!

We conceived, shot, and edited Sanjiban over five intense days in March 2012. To qualify as a competitor in the Doc Challenge, our finished documentary had to conform to a randomly assigned genre (“biography”), be four to seven minutes in length, and incorporate this year’s theme (“cycles”).

Sanjiban will premiere on May 1 at 7PM at the University of Toronto’s Innis Town Hall.

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Synopsis and Credits

After being diagnosed with terminal cancer, eccentric filmmaker Sanjiban Sellew spent his final days at home with family and...

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In this installment of “Remarkable Short Docs” we present Just the Mussel Guy?, a multimedia story about a mussel farmer in Maine. Photojournalist Casey Atkins spoke with Ben in person.

Ben: So, how did you find this guy?

Casey: I was at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, and we had to find a photo story—I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but I kind of wanted to do something particular to Maine. I was playing fiddle at an Irish session and that’s where I met Carter. I asked him what he did and he said he was a mussel farmer. I didn’t really know anything about mussel farming and thought that that sounded really interesting, so later on I got in touch with him and asked if I could come out on his boat.

I don’t think he realized the extent of what I was going to be doing,...

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