The Documentary of the Imagination project will research and develop innovative ways of working with documentary film participants, enabling the production of new films and ground-breaking insights into the imaginative worlds of the participants and their societies. In a world where self-staging via social media is increasingly prevalent in everyday life, where documentary formats are in flux, and where documentaries are available on ever more diverse platforms, questions of how filmmakers select their participants, work with them in ethical ways to elicit meaningful performances for the camera and then transform these performances into insightful nonfiction films are more urgent than ever. Through a series of four intensive film shoots and an extended editing process, complemented by rigorous critical analysis, this practice-led project will examine how the working methods developed by Principal Investigator Joshua Oppenheimer while making his two feature documentaries, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), may be transferred and adapted to new cultural and political contexts. Those two films, part-funded by the AHRC, are among the most successful and critically-lauded documentaries of recent times, winning more than 140 awards between them, including a BAFTA, two Oscar nominations and the Puma Impact Award. Widely seen as game-changers, Werner Herzog described the films as 'a new form of cinematic surrealism', establishing a third space between fiction and non-fiction. This new project seeks to define, translate and advance those films' methodology of 'self-staging and recursive reflexivity', developed by Oppenheimer and partly inspired by the pioneering practices of ethnographer Jean Rouch. In this method, Oppenheimer invited potential participants to stage themselves on camera in whatever ways they wished, inviting them to dramatise their lives and ambitions for the future. Soon after, he screened footage from each shoot back to them, on the basis of which they devised new scenes. The current project will apply these filmmaking methods in three new geographical, cultural and political contexts - Europe, Africa and the USA - and will investigate and compare how they must be adapted to each location. It will explore the different forms a 'documentary of the imagination' might take, and what kinds of histories may be narrated in each place. The research journey will be extensively and critically documented through ethnographic observation techniques, interviews and a reflective diary, and will be shared through three key outputs: a monograph, an interactive documentary (i-doc) and a web portal. The project will also produce an edited volume of essays on this documentary method, as well as two public symposia. Together, these will provide a unique account of Oppenheimer's working processes in the early stages of producing new and innovative feature documentaries, as well as offering insights and tools for other filmmakers to engage with and build upon in their own films. The project will bring academics together with filmmakers and film industry leaders through a series of public lectures and workshops based on the project's findings, presented by Oppenheimer at leading film festivals across the UK and around the world (as well as through project partners BritDoc Foundation, CPH:DOX and Sundance). Given the high profile achieved by his two earlier films, extensive networks and media interest are already in place for dissemination of this project's outputs. In addition, once this project has ended, Oppenheimer will produce and direct new feature documentaries building directly upon the insights - and incorporating to some extent the film material - attained through this research. These films will be funded separately from this research project (and after it ends) but due credit will be given to the AHRC. The i-doc, monograph, essays and web portal will be marketed alongside the new films.