Constructions of the Real features a wide range of writing from non-fiction and documentary filmmakers who undertake theoretically informed practice and think through making. These global filmmakers and writers straddle the divide between the academy and industry and they reflect on, interrogate and explicate their filmmaking practices in relationship to questions of form, content, and process.

The book is in four sections. The first is on intimate, first-person works where memory and identity are explored. The second features responses to and interventions in historical and dominant relationships to place. The third explores multivarious forms of essay films. In the final section, filmmakers discuss the precarity of non-fiction filmmaking in its form and financial rewards. This book is anti-colonial, in that it offers diverse new voices and new practices promoting hybridity and experimentation and makes claims for knowledges that fall outside of traditional scholarship. This book presents the silenced and the marginalized.

It engages with current debates about the role of creative scholarship and makes a claim for non-fiction filmmaking as a knowledge-making practice for revealing, critiquing, and interpreting the world.

Contributors include Kaveh Abbasian, Judith Aston, Nicholas Andueza, Elisabeth Brun, Joanna Callaghan, Gerda Cammaer, Philip Cartelli, Lorena Cervera, Jill Daniels, Kath Dooley, Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz, Andréa França, Catherine Gough-Brady, Robert Hardcastle, Alex Johnston, Elizabeth Miller, Ros Mortimer, Kim Munro, Minou Norouzi, Stefano Odorico, Rebecca Ora, Sheersha Perera, Christine Rogers, Isabel Seguí, Jeni Thornley and Masha Vlasova.