Ethnic Portraits and Ethnofiction

JEAN-LUC GODARD once observed that every fictional film is a documentary of its actors. Jacques Rivette finessed the aphorism, proposing that every film is a documentary of its own making, not only a record for posterity of the people in it but also a window into the culture that produced it.

Ethnofiction is a neologism which mainly refers to docufiction, a blend of documentary and fiction film. It’s used in visual anthropology as ethnography. Its...