Nanook of the North (1922)
Plays here · source: Internet Archive
A year with an Inuit hunter and his family on the shore of Hudson Bay: building an igloo, spearing seal through the ice, trading fox pelts at the post, waiting out a blizzard. Flaherty staged and re-shot much of it, and the result launched the feature documentary while arguing about its own honesty ever since.
The first documentary anyone lined up to see — and the first argument about where reporting ends and staging begins.
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