It might sound wildly naive to write, but documentary is actually thriving. Every new non-documentarian that I meet responds the same way when I tell them I work in documentary: “I love documentaries!” And when I ask them what they watch, they tell me the same thing: true crime, YouTube explainers, social media video diaries, celebrity biopics. Whether we want it or not, the name we have claimed for ourselves is more popular than ever. Of course, those documentaries are a different breed than the social issue ones, artistic experiments, the community-focused portraits. But shouldn’t it be easy to latch onto the popularity of a format we know so dearly?

The question about this gap—between power and popularity, truth and entertainment, profitability and impact—is at the heart of the Getting Real ’26 theme, “Terms of Service.” This concern is shared between the conference program and the special dossier in this issue: What are the obligations of documentarians today? We’re trying to ask not what the field can do for us but what we can do for the world.

Our cover feature is an extraordinary essay from Argentinian writer and publication editor Lucía Requejo, who mixes together a close reading of December, an interview with its director, Lucas Gallo, a history of recent Argentinian politics, and a first-person account of Fuero de Campo, which can be understood as a collective act of service from a film community in defiance of state insistence on their invisibility. The other two pieces in the special section are interviews that preview some of the signature talks at Getting Real ’26. The first is current head of the BFI Doc Society Funds and producer Luke W. Moody’s dialogue with Mandy Chang, recently appointed the first CEO of the UK’s Documentary Film Council. The two discuss Mandy’s path from public service broadcasting to commercial entities and back. The second is my own conversation with three of the Tikkun Olam Productions core members: Pulkit Datta, Marielle Olentine, and Nik Damants. The seven-member nonprofit production company operates as a nonhierarchical collective and takes on only the most political and movement-aligned projects.

Outside of conference planning, we noticed that recent fictional depictions of documentarians have focused on the seeming hypocrisy of our work: How can members of a profession dedicated to speaking truth to power, to social justice, to the small and marginal be so focused on money, fame, and appearance? Writer and documentary filmmaker Carmine Grimaldi does some digging—and finds some bones. Also in this issue, first-time contributor Leila Gómez delivers an essay on Our Land, Lucrecia Martel’s first feature documentary, which looks back at the Argentinian auteur’s larger interest in nonfiction filmmaking, Indigenous rights, and the issue of land dispossession. In a service journalism vein, after learning that WTO/99 (2025) producer/editor Alex Megaro booked the film’s very successful theatrical road tour, we asked him to translate his learnings into an actionable primer for all of our readers, and he agreed.

The festival dispatches cover documentary mainstays CPH:DOX and the Taiwan International Documentary Festival, both known for their political and formally daring selections, and speaking regionally to their corners of the world. Starting on the facing page, Documentary publisher and IDA Executive Director Dominic Willsdon’s new column, ”Notes From the Real,” which compares documentary filmmaking to adjacent but distinct fields. 

Guest columns in this issue include another edition of “Producer’s Diary,” written by filmmaker Giuliano Franco Ochipinti on how his project survived the loss of all but two minutes of production footage. The “What’s in My Bag” cinematographer’s guest column is written by XUE Ming, where he humorously justifies his overstuffed bag (and also a camera assistant for every shoot), whereas editor Qutaiba Barhamji’s “What’s on My Desk” makes a case for mood, note-taking restraint, and the value of the handmade. We close with another edition of Screen Time.

No matter where you are living, or whether you’re joining us for Getting Real ’26, we hope that you “ask of us here the same high standards of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you.”

Abby Sun
Editor, Documentary