Documentaries are an inside look at an event, a person or a phenomenon or anything really, the list could go on for a while. Anything can be made into a documentary. What differentiates a documentary from a fictional film is that a documentary claims to present factual information about a certain topic whilst fictional films do not.
Documentaries usually contain footage that was recorded as it happened, in order for the audience to get a sense of reality. There may also be certain scenes which were staged, this is not the case for ‘One Year Lease’ Directed by Brian Bolster. All of the scenes within the short documentary are filmed as they happened, seemingly unplanned/not staged. The audio footage of his landlady is, we assume, real. It is interspersed with video footage from Bolsters Phone of the leaks that continuously occur, the décor of the apartment, his cat and other mundane aspects of their life. Some documentaries can take a side or advocate for something, often using rhetoric to persuade audiences of something. ‘One Year Lease’ did not try to convince anyone of anything, as some documentaries do. This documentary was more of a statement of a certain part of the film maker’s life. This documentary fits into the ‘direct-cinema’ genre of documentary film-making, although there is little involvement with the film-maker as he is recording his own life, his own tale, his own facts.
Being a short documentary, with seemingly no obvious contention or reason for its being, this documentary is to a certain extent, a comment about human life. We hear countless voicemails being left to these tenants, by a resilient yet clearly lonely lady. We pity her and yet we understand the tenants frustration by her constant meddling. Once they move to their new place they are greeted with a cold, slightly heartless and without care landlord, making the audience question was the landlady so bad to begin with? Documentaries are meant to make the audience feel something from the reality of what they are showing, this documentary captures this objective in a unique way.
