Is this a documentary?

Movies that, not being “pure” documentarys, have moments of great closeness to reality or talk about their own process and their own nature. Films that are a reflection on cinema itself, its devices, its infinite and almost magical possibilities and their yet bigger limitations. Or …. is this a documentary?
Kiarostami is one of the artist that went further in blurring the boundaries of the documentary, moved always by great interest in the reality. If the last sequence of “The Taste of Cherry” with a digital camera showing the film crew raised some interesting debates, then what about the two scenes in Oliveira´s “Benilde or the Virgin Mother”, the opening and final – in which the camera moves from the studio back into it, doing the reverse movement at the end, in one of the most amazing scenes i´ve seen in cinema. In “The Day of Despair”, the actors become the characters before our eye, in a astonishing scene. Not wanting to compare or rank the two directors, the fact is that Oliveira did this movies decades before kiarostami.