Radical Reality: Documentary Storytelling and the Global Fight for Social Justice

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.

Caty Borum is Executive Director of the Center for Media & Social Impact and Provost Associate Professor at the American University School of Communication. She is an award-winning documentary producer, book author, engaged scholar, professor, and strategist working at the intersection of social change communication, documentary, and entertainment storytelling.

David Conrad-Pérez is a journalist, media historian and Research Director of the Center for Media & Social Impact at American University, working at the intersection of documentary studies, journalism history, and social justice.