Towards the end of 2007, one of the Shooting People team, Ben Blaine, wondered what defined film for the 'noughties' and (as you can read on there) I instantly thought that it was the low-level almost 'secret' stuff that had really excited me, not the megabucks blockbusters. Possibly that comes from working in documentary where it's rare a film goes stellar, but it's a definite taste preference for me too.

But what I didn't say was that, aside from your FourDocs of this world, I was specifically thinking about what's been ironically dubbed 'Mumblecore' but effectively means a whole rash of recent American movies that have been made on ultra-low budgets, been self-distributed, feature a clique of filmmaker-actor-auteurs and...are just utterly amazing and revolutionary!

Seriously, you should check out as much of it as you can - it's hard to get your hands on a lot of it, mainly because it's onlt just breaking out of the US, but start with Andrew Bujalski's Mutual Appreciation and its predecessor, Funny Ha Ha, and, if you can face the wait for it to arrive in the post or you're in the States, Joe Swanberg's stunning and really beautiful LOL

So why am I mentioning these fiction films on the FourDocs blog? Because it occured to me that since everyone in the films plays a barely-heightened version of themselves, and because most of these films feature twenty-somethings recreating exaggerated versions of their mundane daily lives and concerns, and also because mostly they use roaming 'observational'-style cameras and natural non-performances and non-scenes, they really feel like documentaries. In a way, they're even more documentaryish than loads of actual documentaries in the sense there's no pretence, no unbelievable framing structures, there's just instinctive being-yourself on camera. And it (unwittingly?) makes you think of how many subjects in 'real' documentaries play up to the gaze of the filmmaker, but don't admit to doing so - or at least this isn't acknowledged by the filmmaker.

Maybe this is me getting too excited, but one thing I know - for me, this really is the most exciting film 'movement' of the 21st century