What Is Post-Documentary Cinema?
My first film was about people who could not be filmed.
They suffered from electromagnetic hypersensitivity — their bodies reacted to the waves emitted by cameras, microphones, screens. I couldn't sit them in front of a lens and ask them to describe their pain. The very act of filming was the thing that hurt them.
So I had to find another way. Not to document what I could see, but to make the viewer feel what the characters described: the invisible smog of electromagnetic fields that saturates our connected world. The images had to bleed. The sound had to carry the weight of what waves do to a body. I wasn't capturing reality — I was reinventing a form to film the invisible.
That was Dark Waves (2017), and that was the moment I understood: documentary cinema can go beyond what is captured. It must. When your subject is invisible, you have to invent the apparatus that makes it felt.
The inverted balance
When I was finishing Swatted — a film about gamers whose identities were stolen to trigger armed police raids, streamed live for entertainment — I came across the deepfake. I was studying how a young man had fabricated over a hundred personas online, each one convincing enough to mobilize real people, real institutions, real violence. The fake had become operational. It didn't need to be believed by everyone. It only needed to circulate.
That was 2019. Since then, the balance has inverted completely. For most of cinema's history, the documentary gesture pointed at the real and said: this happened, look. Today, the question is no longer what is fake. The question is what, if anything, is still real. What circulates online is, by default, generated, fabricated, filtered, remixed. The authentic is the exception, not the rule.
Documentary cinema has not caught up with this inversion. It still operates as though a camera pointed at a face produces truth. It doesn't. It produces an image. What that image means depends on the system it moves through — the platform, the algorithm, the context of reception, the viewer's own relationship to what is credible.
A gesture, not a genre
Post-documentary cinema begins with this acceptance: the documentary has always been a point of view. Things enter the frame and others are left out. That was always the case. What has changed is that the frame itself is no longer stable.
Post-documentary is not a genre. It is not docufiction. It is not simulation, not pure animation, not generative film, not non-linear cinema. It is not "AI filmmaking." It is none of these things because it refuses to be any fixed thing.
It is a gesture.
The gesture is this: start from the subject. Not from a rulebook, not from a genre, not from a technique. Face the subject and ask — what form does this demand? What apparatus must be invented to be true to this specific story? Each film requires a new device, a new mise en scène, a new way of seeing. It is emergent — like gameplay, where the rules arise from the encounter, not from a manual.
The truth is not in the single image. It is in the process, the dataset, the system. An image generated by AI and stopped at a certain stage of its rendering is as documentary as a photograph — if the gesture behind it is honest. All material is valid: fiction, animation, archival footage, generated imagery, captured reality, the fake, the found. The only rule is coherence between the film and its subject. The mise en scène must be in phase with what is being shown.
This is not postmodernism. There is no ironic distance here. There are real people, real consequences, real bodies. Post-documentary borrows the freedom of fragmentation and genre-crossing, but it stays rooted in something that irony cannot touch: the ethics of facing a real person and being accountable to what happened to them.
Liquid writing
Maalbeek is a film about the 2016 Brussels metro bombing. Its subject is a woman who remembers nothing. She was there, she survived, but her memory is fractured, incomplete, contradictory. You cannot film this with a conventional documentary apparatus. There is no event to reconstruct, no archive footage, no stable testimony. What exists is the shape of an absence.
So the film became a process of representing fragmented memory — not documenting what happened, but making the viewer experience what it feels like when the past will not cohere into a single narrative. The impossibility of access to the event became generative. The film was still being written in the edit.
This is what I call liquid writing. Research, writing, shooting, and editing happen simultaneously and contaminate each other. They are not stages in a pipeline. They are states of a continuous flow. An algorithmic accident from three months ago resurfaces and becomes a structural principle. A conversation with a subject reshapes the edit, which sends me back to the archive, which changes how I shoot the next scene. The phases bleed into each other.
I don't use AI to make things faster. I use it to displace my own thinking — what I call alteration rather than augmentation. AI is a force of productive friction. It introduces something foreign into the process, something that pushes back against my own interpretive habits. The output is not a solution — it is a pressure on the work.
The latent space is a documentary territory. The singular traces of the real contaminate generative models. What emerges is neither testimony nor fiction. It is a third path: counterfactual narration — the representation of what could have been, what almost was, what exists in the space of possibility. When I feed a model with Joshua Goldberg's traces and it generates a face that is none of his personas and all of them at once, that image is not a lie. It is a document of multiplicity. It shows what no camera could capture: the superposition of a hundred performed identities in a single body.
Three films, three impossibilities
In Swatted, the subject was online violence that plays out inside video games. I couldn't film the events — they had already happened, inside virtual worlds, to anonymous players. So I used the game engine itself as a documentary tool, stripping it of its textures to expose the wireframe underneath. The wireframe became a metaphor: the networks that connect us, the transparency of our data, the architecture beneath the surface. The game was diverted, turned against itself, made to reveal what it was designed to hide.
In Maalbeek, the subject was a memory that didn't exist. In Swatted, the subject was a violence that had no physical location. In each case, the impossibility of conventional filming was not an obstacle — it was the starting point. The form had to be invented because the reality demanded it.
The Goldberg Variations takes this further. I am making a film about Joshua Ryne Goldberg — a young man who, from his bedroom in Florida, created over a hundred online personas. He was simultaneously a white supremacist, a radical Islamist, a feminist blogger, a GamerGate troll, and an anti-war activist. He fabricated entire lives, entire belief systems, entire conflicts. He was arrested by the FBI in 2015.
Joshua is the first inhabitant of latent space.
He is as multiple as the space of possibilities itself. He morphs, invents, reinvents himself permanently — like the T-1000 in Terminator 2, liquid metal taking any form. He turns his own life into a space of infinite directions — everywhere and nowhere at once. He is latent.
The mise en scène of this film is the mise en scène of the maybe — of what could be true, of what was performed as truth, of what the machine dreams when fed with the traces of a person who was already, in life, a generative model.
This is what post-documentary cinema does. It does not document the real. It documents the space between the real and its fabrication — using the same tools of fabrication as its formal grammar.