Truth, Dare or Promise: Art and Documentary Revisited reflects on the ways that artists and filmmakers address the innovations and limitations of producing and exhibiting their work. Ranging from community collaboration to individual interpretation, and from gallery installation to cinematic screening, this book explores the differences and overlaps between definitions and methodologies. With an international reach, including contributors who are both practitioners and theorists, this book maps out developments in art and documentary, covering themes that include explorations of personal experience and representations of the past, while examining interactive galleries and the cinematic space.

There has been a significant growth in autobiographical documentary films in recent years. This innovative book proposes that the filmmaker in her dual role as maker and subject may act as a cultural guide in an exploration of the social world. It argues that, in the cinematic mediation of memory, the mimetic approach in the construction of documentary films may not be feasible, and memory may instead be evoked elliptically through hybrid strategies such as critical realism and fictional enactment. Recognizing that identity is formed by history and what `goes on' in the world, the book charts the historical trajectory of the British independent filmmaking movement from the mid-1970s to the present growth of new online distribution outlets and new media through digital technologies and social media.