Exit From The Lumière Factory
Director: Sid Iandovka
2026
Duration: 18 min.
Prompted Reality
In 1895, the Lumière workers leaving the factory did so in three takes, carefully playing themselves at the request of their director-employers. Thus, one of the earliest “pre-documentary” films in history already bore the marks of “post-documentary” practice. In the public imagination, “documentary” is still synonymous with “truthful” and “objective”, despite the fact that manipulation has always been an ontological necessity of the genre. Soon, AI-generated videos in the documentary style will become indistinguishable from real footage — making it a good time to remember that documentary filmmakers were writing prompts for reality long before AI existed. They simply called them documentary scripts. Read more
