Radical Reality reveals how independent documentary makers around the world produce cinematic stories that speak truth to power-and why nonfiction storytelling matters for social justice. Pushing against increasingly difficult political and economic constraints, these tenacious filmmakers produce artistic nonfiction stories that stand up for freedom of expression, serve as witnesses to conflict and resilience, maintain cultural memory of human rights abuses, and open intimate windows into acts of protest, activism, reconciliation, and resistance that often go unseen in dominant news portrayals. They collaborate with activists and civil society leaders to create powerful movements of dissent, centering underrepresented voices, providing spaces for community healing and recognition, and challenging damaging narratives of people and their lived realities--and they do so in significant times. Across the globe, forms of repression continue to be wielded against artists who challenge power. And yet, there is hope and inspiration found in the hands of storytellers who marshal a way forward, again and again, to push the status quo toward justice. This book tells their stories.

"Recommended" - D. L. LeMahieu, CHOICE

"Radical Reality: Documentary Storytelling and the Global Fight for Social Justice offers an unprecedented analysis of the most powerful documentaries worldwide-films that have become essential for social change in small communities and larger democracies, helping evacuate people from dangerous places and rewrite histories distorted by colonialism. But the book offers more than an analysis of good stories for social justice: it also brings the challenges of independent filmmaking into the discussion and offers strategies for navigating them. It is a critical work that poses timely questions about the role of documentary as "a form of civil storytelling"(p. 11)in strengthening activism and grassroots movements, and, more importantly, about the future of independent filmmaking itself." - Kateryna Bystrytska, International Journal of Communication