‘It was very hard to see myself as a director’: the Australian film-maker changing the documentary genre

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“There are so many hang-ups in the documentary world about this idea of ultimate truth,” says Gabrielle Brady. “There’s only subjectivity in documentary. It’s all a construction.” Ever since Louis Lumière filmed workers leaving his factory in 1895, documentary film has struggled with the idea of authenticity. Lumière’s 17-metre film is regarded as the first ever made, yet even this modest document is a lie: it was filmed not on a work day, but a Sunday. Ethnographer Robert Flaherty staged scenes in his 1922 documentary Nanook of the North, and it was Michael Moore’s crafty editing that made Roger and...