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This week’s film Grizzly Man is a film that I have seen multiple times. It’s a footage about a man using entirely ‘found footage’ – a documentary that despite being almost entirely shot by its subject, was created without its subject being truly present, as he was dead before Herzog began work on the film.

This got me thinking about films which do similar things. Documentaries which are composed entirely of found footage, or those whose stories are told via narration alone.

It reminded me of a film by my favourite documentarian Sean Dunne, who created a film called Cam Girlz, in which its subjects, with one exception, are never interviewed on camera. This is a very rare occurrence for a feature length film. It doesn’t use any found footage, and instead creates a colourful, insightful piece filled with beautiful cinematography.

The choice to interview the women of the film off camera was deliberate, and has resulted in wonderfully intimate conversations that sound truly genuine and afford a deeper look into these women’s lives than could have ever been achieved with the pressure of an on-camera interview.

See below for the trailer and a short interview with the filmmaker that further explains his choices and the outcomes of these cinematic decisions –