This is a celebration of the art of the documentary from its origins to the present day. With the critical and box-office success in the nineties of Microcosmos, When We Were Kings, Hoop Dreams and Hearts of Darkness, documentary films are now attracting more popular interest than at almost any time in their history. To contexualize and encourage this renewal of interest in cinema's most under-appreciated genre, Macdonald and Cousins have compiled a wide-ranging collection of writings about and by documentary film-makers and their work. Underlying the entire collection is the passionate beleif that documentary can be as diverse and imaginatively rich as non-fiction writing - by turns polemical, personal, journalistic, emotive and poetic.