The documentary is arguably the most challenging and influential genre of media today. It touches, informs, and sometimes outrages millions of viewers seeking facts and insights in a complex world. This introduction to the genre starts and ends with workers leaving the factory: we begin with the earliest “actuality” films of the Lumière brothers and end with Harun Farocki a century later, returning to the scene of the crime to explore the history of cinema and the pursuit of documentary “truth.” Ethical, technical, and aesthetic issues are foregrounded. We examine the role of staging, re-enactment, archival footage, narration, animation, point of view, listening, witnessing, and performance. We discuss the many uses of documentary—as a tool for social change and political activism, a means of personal expression, a form of popular entertainment, as propaganda, and as visual history, ethnography, and journalism. The course emphasizes how changing technology, and shifting social, cultural, and political contexts, continually re-define what documentary is. Weekly screenings and discussions consist of classic as well as more contemporary and/or iconoclastic works by: Vertov, Flaherty, Rouch, Billops, Riggs, Marker, Akerman, Panh, Steyerl, among others.