first, I was very surprised that I hadn't picked up that the Moss family were collaboratively created by writers and actors. The actors did excellent jobs, far more believable than the actors in Mail Order Wife, for example, and I was caught completely by surprise.

Second, it really got me thinking about the novelty of mixing fiction and reality in this way, and considering the degree to which it was different from what occurs normally in the documentary filmmaking process. As close-reading documentary film fans know well, docs are often highly manipulated constructions of reality. The director and film crew work to get the shots they need, often prodding the subjects to provide certain responses either through asking the same questions over and over until the answer is provided or sometimes even putting the answer in the subject's mouth. Once the director has gotten the footage he wants, the second stage of the construction occurs in the editing booth. The director and editor reshape the footage: reordering chronology, omitting some details and emphasizing others, mixing footage and sound bites, etc. The end result is a story that may bare little resemblance to the actual events “documented.” By mixing fact and fiction so completely, Burns and Brown created a hybrid which in some ways is probably no less authentic than tone-poem-cum-documentaries like Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y or arguably even well-massaged/polished standard docs like The King of Kong, yet it is different. While it’s certainly not the first film to mix fiction and non-fiction so completely, it’s the first that blindsided me and really got me thinking about what is or is not a documentary and how that matters.

I could ramble on and on and make some comparisons to other films, genres, and even mediums (Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia photography, for example), but I’ll leave it there, and invite responses about whether any of what I’ve said makes sense, and/or what others think about this film or wherever their thoughts lead.

I was thinking how incredibly lucky the filmmakers were to find this particular family to put the human face on the story in such an incredibly interesting way. After the revelation, I was just floored at how well the real and unreal elements were blended together.