The use of drama in documentaries sparks a debate between fears of fabrication and the celebration of filling gaps left by missing visual archives. This hybrid format occupies a middle ground, merging emotional impact with documentary reality. Its use requires strict ethical constraints to prevent deception. With the rise of digital platforms, "docudrama" has transcended the rigid limits of television, venturing into new creative and cinematic horizons.
While preparing and directing a documentary for Al Jazeera about the 90th anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, neither archival footage nor real-life scenes filmed at various locations in Britain, where I was presenting the film, helped me construct a complete documentary narrative that could evoke this important anniversary. I thought of embodying certain historical events through dramatic scenes that simulate reality to strengthen the visual narration of the film’s structure. That moment was the beginning of my directorial and academic interest in docudrama.
The mere mention of drama and documentary in a single term draws the attention of specialists and non-specialists alike. It is an attention that ranges between suspicion and celebration. The source of suspicion here is the fear of falsification and manipulation of truth in the name of art, on the grounds that drama is synonymous with imagination, while documentary is synonymous with truth and reality. Celebration, meanwhile, focuses on the idea that drama breathes life into real scenes that the documentary camera did not reach, making them appear as though they were new, exclusive archive footage being revealed by the director to the viewer for the first time.
The British academic Derek Paget places docudrama in a middle zone within a spectrum of hybrid film and television programme forms. At the far right of this spectrum stands the fictional form, represented by drama, while at the far left stands the factual form, represented by documentary film.
Paget argues that this form of marrying fiction and reality is an artistic necessity imposed by the film's requirements. For that reason, he titled his book No Other Way to Tell It: Docudrama on Film and Television. (1)
The mere mention of drama and documentary in a single term draws the attention of specialists and non-specialists alike. It is an attention that ranges between suspicion and celebration. The source of suspicion here is the fear of falsification and manipulation of truth in the name of art.
He expressed this idea through the attached arrow, which represents a “direct relationship”: the further we move to the right, the more “creative intervention and imagination” dominate; the further we move to the left, the greater the space occupied by “truth and archive”. All of these are artistic forms that develop over time.
(Source: No Other Way to Tell It: Docudrama on Film and Television, Derek Paget)
The 1975 docudrama Days of Hope, broadcast on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), was an important milestone in the trajectory of this hybrid form of visual narration. On the surface, the story was historical, with British director Ken Loach addressing, in four parts, events from the First World War, beginning in 1916, through to the General Strike in Britain in 1926. (2) In that period, the country was seething with social conflicts and the struggle of the working class. It was broadcast in the mid-1970s and coincided with an economic crisis that struck the country, making it seem like a historical projection onto contemporary reality, even though it did not address it directly or indirectly. This provoked the anger of a large number of veterans because of the film’s negative portrayal of the British Army. The British press debated whether such a drama could be shown on the BBC, arguing that it reflected a left-wing viewpoint and that another drama presenting a right-wing viewpoint was needed to achieve balance. Because of the public celebration it received, this docudrama revealed the power of influence this hybrid form of art possesses. It takes from drama its best qualities, namely emotional impact and plot, and from documentary its best qualities, namely contact with reality and the recording of events.
Despite the many terms used to describe the blending of drama and documentary, the common description of Days of Hope is docudrama: a work that largely relies on dramatic acting while incorporating factual elements, whether by embodying real history or including archive scenes. This differs from another description, 'dramatic documentary' or 'dramadoc', in which the film’s structure relies on the familiar documentary structure, such as interviews, while introducing some dramatic acted scenes. (3)
This latter type includes The Balfour Legacy, broadcast on Al Jazeera, which used dramatic scenes to portray key figures in issuing the famous Balfour Declaration. The actors did not speak in those scenes; their movements were sometimes accompanied by historians' words and at other times by music, driven by considerations including the low production budget and a concern for accuracy and fidelity to historical transmission, without compromising the documentary's credibility.
Several years later, Al Jazeera produced Lines in the Sand: 100 Years After Sykes-Picot for the centenary of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, under which Britain and France divided the Ottoman Empire's possessions during the First World War. It was a unique experience of a dramatic documentary on Al Jazeera, because the actors spoke in the dramatic scenes. From an editorial standpoint, the decision to have actors speak in dramatic scenes in a documentary film was not easy. It required a precise review of the dramatic dialogue to ensure it matched the minutes of the historical meetings, removing any suspicion of bias or historical distortion.
The element of drama emerges as an intrusion into the specificity of the documentary film, an intrusion that raises an old debate about the limits and possibilities of representation. Critics of docudrama argue that the re-enactment of events, however accurate it may be, remains incapable of attaining the truth of reality, opening the door to the possibility of misleading or falsification. By contrast, another view holds that the documentary camera itself is not entirely neutral.
The Missing Camera
The option of using drama within the structure of a documentary film often arises when visual documentation of the event is absent. Here, the question arises: should the director rely only on oral accounts of what happened and documents? Or is there another creative way to turn these documented oral testimonies and documents into an aesthetic visual narrative?
In this context, the element of drama emerges as an intrusion into the specificity of the documentary film, an intrusion that raises an old debate about the limits and possibilities of representation. Critics of docudrama argue that reenacting events, however accurate, cannot capture the truth of reality, opening the door to misleading or falsifying it. By contrast, another view holds that the documentary camera itself is not entirely neutral; it does not necessarily falsify reality, but it remains governed by the director’s choices, from the angle of filming to editing and the way the narrative is constructed, all of which in turn impose a particular vision of reality.
In the end, the angle is part of the scene, not the whole scene. Therefore, credibility here is not confined to the literal transmission of reality, because that is impossible, but to imposing certain ethical constraints on those dramatic scenes in order to prevent confusion between them and recorded reality. Among these constraints are placing the phrase “dramatised scenes” at the top of the screen and exercising accuracy and fidelity when embodying dramatic scenes, so they are based on an external documentary source, whether oral testimony or an important document. In this framework, docudrama, or dramatic documentary, appears to summon an imagined missing camera that filmed the event but was lost. Drama then calls it back once more.
The option of using drama within the structure of a documentary film often arises when visual documentation of the event is absent. Here, the question arises: should the director be content with oral accounts of what happened and rely only on documents? Or is there another creative way to turn these documented oral testimonies and documents into an aesthetic visual narrative?
More Than Mere Simulation
With the proliferation of digital platforms and the multiplicity of forms of television and cinematic production, the mechanisms for blending drama and documentary have developed, and drama has gone beyond mere simulation of events within the structure of a documentary film. For example, the documentary The Social Dilemma on Netflix presented a unique model of fictional drama within a documentary, namely, drama that explains its subject. The film discusses the negative social impact of social media. When specialists speak about the psychological, social and behavioural consequences, the film presents imagined scenes of a control room, as though social media algorithms were real people monitoring users’ movements on these applications through surveillance screens and actively directing them.
This model of film is free from the editorial and artistic oversight that usually governs television channels, which adhere to strict professional charters and strive not to blur the line between fiction and fact, since they most often broadcast news and investigations. They are closer to journalistic practice than to cinema. For that reason, many directors of docudramas or dramatic documentaries find the world of television constraining and move towards cinema. Among them is the British director Ken Loach, who left the BBC and began showing his work in cinemas. This leads to a fundamental idea about the relationship between artistic form and the medium of exhibition. Television, as a primarily domestic media platform linked to news, cannot be separated from the artistic patterns it shows. We must bear in mind that the concept of documentary film is modern, coined by the Scottish director John Grierson in 1926. After that, documentary film took different forms as television provided an important platform for circulation. Therefore, the mutation of artistic forms over time, or changes in exhibition media, is a fact. These hybrid patterns between drama and documentary may lead to new artistic forms in the future, especially now that digital platforms have entered documentary film production.
References
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Paget, D. (2011) No Other Way to Tell It: Docudrama on Film and Television. 2nd edn.
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Sterling, C. H. (ed.) (2009) Encyclopedia of Journalism. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications. Manchester; New York; Manchester University Press (Book, Whole).
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Rosenthal, A. (1998) Why Docudrama: Fact-Fiction on Film and TV. Carbondale, Ill; London; Southern Illinois University Press (Book, Whole).
This article was originally published in Arabic on 08/05/2026.
