This course explores the boundaries between fiction and documentary in film and video, and registers shifts in contemporary art in relation to these forms. In particular, we will look at the way experimental movements in documentary and carefully constructed parafictions can engage and interact with political spaces differently than traditional documentary or fiction. Students will research, write, and produce three video projects based on complicating fiction and fact. The course will include regular screenings, readings, critiques and discussions in addition to workshops and demonstrations on technique. 

Carrie Lambert-Beatty writes in “Make Believe: Parafiction and Plausibility”:
(…) a parafiction is related to but not quite a member of the category of fiction as established in literary and dramatic art. It remains a bit outside. It does not perform its procedures in the hygienic clinics of literature, but has one foot in the field of the real…
Simply put, with various degrees of success, for various durations, and for various purposes, these fictions are experienced as fact.