When I first went to college to get my bachelor's degree, it was with a burning passion in my heart for fiction filmmaking. I wanted to be like Spielberg, Lumet, and Hitchcock. I wanted to learn about cinematography and lighting, editing and screenwriting. I wanted to make films, even if they were just crummy VHS videos.

I did NOT want to learn about documentary.

But in my particular filmmaking program, it was required to take basic courses in a number of things that didn't interest me, foremost among them being "Introduction to Nonfiction Filmmaking," or as it was known around campus, "doc."

As you can probably guess, the point of this story is to clue you in to how wrong I was and try and prepare you to overcome the same narrow-mindedness I had. My final project in that class, a humorous doc about people's relationship to their own bathrooms intercut with bathroom scenes from popular films, was probably my best project during my entire time in school. That's saying something because I wrote, acted in, and directed some award-winning short films (comedies and dramas). But my doc is the thing I look back on with the most pride.

When I taught Film as Lit for the first time two years ago, I included a unit on doc because... well, I needed to fill time and I didn't quite know what else to do. Those students, like my younger self, were NOT interested...

...at first.

But when it came time to do final projects, more than half chose to make a documentary, having discovered the same thing I did years earlier: There is as much, if not more, creativity and inventiveness in making nonfiction film as their is in making fiction film.

Over the course of the next six weeks, you'll learn about the six types of documentary and how each is a response to those that have come before. And you'll discover that you gravitate toward certain kinds of documentaries more than others not because of the subject matter, per se, but because of the philosophy that guides the filmmaking. You'll see what I mean.

And of course the guiding question for this unit is this: Is there really any such thing as a truly nonfiction film?