The Little Prince (1943)
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Chapter Six: the little prince and the narrator talk about sunsets
"One day," you said to me, "I saw the sunset forty-four times!"
And a little later you added: "You know-- one loves the sunset, when one is so sad..."
"Were you so sad, then?" I asked, "on the day of the forty-four sunsets?"
But the little prince made no reply.
Where the Truth Lies—Or Not (2011)
Rachel Kamerman
Documentary Magazine, Spring 2011
To insist on literal truth at every turn in a documentary would rob a filmmaker of his or her tools to contextualize information and character. Simple omission—filtering the flow of human information to extract the minerals of a story's Essential Truth—is invaluable.
The documentary filmmaker in his or her element is still a storyteller, albeit one who deals in the real.
Audiences walk away from documentaries remembering the things that made them cry, made them laugh, made them think, made them relate. They do not walk away admiring the integrity of the process.