Ethnofiction’s Rebirth: Fusing Memory and Documentary

A slight breeze hoists the desert dust as a figure hikes through ochre sand, camera in hand, a defiant gaze, and a story untamed. In Bye Bye Tiberias (2023), filmmaker Lina Soualem walks through generations of memory with grace, tracing the lives of women across decades. On the surface, Bye Bye Tiberias is a documentary, but the film quickly slips into something more, wavering between literalism and dreamscape. Soualem invites her mother to relive the past through various reenactments: walking through ancestral paths, sitting in sun-stained kitchens, or narrating memories. Though staged, these scenes pulse with authenticity, blurring the line between lived experience and performance. Through this blend, Soualem breathes new life into a forgotten cinematic tradition where truth isn’t relayed, but constructed: ethnofiction.

Ethnofiction, pioneered by the 20th-century French filmmaker Jean Rousch, fuses ethnography, documentary, and dramatization. It is not reality television nor staged cinema; rather, it operates in a gray zone characterized by storytelling—subjects and actors are not merely observed, but become co-creators. In short, Rousch blurs fiction and documentary; the subjects of the documentary take the lead in documenting their own stories. In ethnofiction, truth is adorned, reshaped, and performed; the past becomes pliable for a present canvas. Rousch’s ethnofiction has always been a tangled form of beauty and ethical thorns. In resisting passive observation, it forces the viewer to reckon with the performance as an expression rather than a recollection of events, adding a certain level of depth that traditional documentaries lack. In Rousch’s Chronique d’un été (1961), for example, Parisians are interviewed about their lives, only to later critique their own footage, provoking a disarming result: a documentary that unfolds into a critique, of its own manipulations and questioning the nature of the film itself. 

Today, this impulse to blur the lines between real and staged vibrates through global film. Pedro Costa’s Vitalina Varela (2019) casts its star as herself, haunted by shadows and memory, her grief rendered in painterly stillness as she reenacts her trauma. In Atlantics (2019), Mati Diop crafts a story rooted in migration and loss, where the dead return not as specters of horror, but as vessels injected with memory. Instead of strict factual accuracy, Diop uses fiction to explore emotional truths that the characters choose to repress; spirits that represent the characters’ reminiscing on their past interrogate and foster discussion and disagreement within the story, arousing their memory and emotion. Like Rousch and Soualem, she uses performance not to distort reality, but to highlight the unlit, the parts that are too often silenced and ignored.  

However, performing one’s own trauma plays with the consequence of commodifying a community’s pain for artistic ends rather than just documenting it for the general public. At its best, ethnofiction navigates this space with care. In an age hungry for authenticity, audiences crave stories that feel unfiltered. Ethnofictional films don’t promise objective truth—they expose the layers of construction behind what we see, reminding us of the framing by which stories are told. The beauty of ethnofiction lies in that it neither hides behind historical truth nor pure fiction; it provokes audiences, poking at historical representation of society which mask raw storytelling. 

More than just a stylistic choice or ethical workaround, ethnofiction speaks the language of collaboration: fluid, adaptive, and unsettling, inviting subjects to write their own myths. In doing so, this performance isn’t a lie—it is a passage through time and the storyteller’s recollection of events, suggesting that memory is not an artifact to be recovered and displayed, but an evolving narrative reconstructed to make meaning of the past. Ethnofiction stages truth not as fact, but as feeling.