Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/957795
40 DGA QUARTERLY PHOTOS: (TOP) MICHAEL TACKET/BLEECKER STREET; (BOTTOM) EVERETT Gabriela Cowperthwaite, above, with her DP, Lorenzo Senatore, set up a shot for Megan Leavey; (left), a scene from Cowperthwaite's documentary, Blackfish. SWITCHING GEARS Filmmakers who straddle the line between fiction and nonfiction are storytellers first and foremost By Guy Lodge N F I L M L A N G UA G E , "documen- tary" and "narrative" are often used as if they are mutually exclusive terms. Practitioners may know the difference, yet upon further ex- amination, the lines become blurred; whether performed by actors or pieced together from the archives, almost any film is first and fore- most an act of storytelling. It's the recognition of that shared principle that enables some filmmakers to swing freely and flexibly between the two disci- plines, bringing the truth-seeking drive of their documentary work to Hollywood-style narratives, or the formal creativity of fiction to purely factual material—sometimes even minting ex- citing hybrids in the space between. But how do these adaptable storytellers define and navigate the transi- tion, and how has their art grown from it? For docmaker Jeffrey Friedman, half of the directing team that includes longtime collaborator Rob Epstein, the shift into narrative cinema was an overdue one: "It was always part of the five-year plan," he says. "It just took 20 years to complete it." The pair first teamed up to Oscar-winning effect on the 1989 AIDS-epidemic reflection Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt; two decades later, they segued I