Once upon a time, documentaries came to us in the third person, a fair look at an event or person by a trained filmmaker, with professional narration leading your way. After all, the term is based on “documents” of reality. But ever since the ’70s, filmmakers have emerged from behind the camera and started using the first person. The documents are of the filmmaker’s own experience.

“There’s been a significant development in American documentaries this year,” Sundance Programmer David Courier said. “Filmmakers are responding to the limitations of mainstream media, taking matters into their own hands. We’ve had a resurgence of personal docs, but they look different than they have in the past. Influenced by Internet blogging, these documentaries use personal experience as a stepping-stone to explore and reflect the broader society. The result is urgent investigation that is both palpably personal and at the same time searingly topical.”

Why choose a subject so close to home?

In Bigger, Stronger, Faster*, Christopher Bell, a USC film school grad, put his two passions together by turning the camera on his world of working out and weight training. The film chronicles the effects of taking steroids on the lives of Bell and his two brothers. After seeing their heroes from movies and sports caught doing illegal, body-enhancing drugs, the three brothers found themselves asking if they should follow their heroes or follow the rules. They “opted to not follow the rules,” Bell explained. “The consequences of that are different for each of us as is how we feel about it.“

“Unlike what is going on in professional sports, we didn’t set out to hurt anybody,” Bell said. “I just set out to tell the truth… I think that’s what is wrong with spending 20 million dollars on a [steroid] investigation into baseball, and they just come out with a whole list of names. But they have no idea why these names did what they did.”

Subtitled The Side Effects of Being American, Bell said the film is “more about the idea of steroids” than simple documentation of taking the drug. He tries to understand the bigger picture not being talked about in America by analyzing his own situation.

By relating her own rape experience to the women in the war-torn country, filmmaker Lisa F. Jackson, at the Festival with The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, could identify in a way other filmmakers could not, and bravely helped women she met by just making the film. Jackson’s goal with the film goes beyond telling a story. She hopes the screenings will start discussion, raise money, change minds, and even change policy.

But to do all this you need more than just a compelling take, noted the long-time filmmaker. You have to have the skill set to create a film. “How does 30 hours become an hour? There is a whole vocabulary of skills around making a documentary that are not necessarily translatable [to another medium]. Definitely not to acrylics! There is no way I could do watercolor of what those women told me.”

After years of editing their epic doc Nerakhoon (The Betrayal), noted cinematographer (Be Kind Rewind) and first-time director Ellen Kuras and her subject/co-director Thavisouk Phrasavath decided the best way to display complex social and political situations in Laos and America from the 60s until present-day was to focus on Phrasavath’s own story of escape and survival. “For me, this film was never intended to be a hard-core cinéma-vérité documentary,” Kuras said. “Rather, I hoped it would be a poetic meditation of the Lao personal worldview and the political forces that shook that world – as well as our own.”

Chris Waitt made A Complete History of My Sexual Failures in order to meditate on…well, the title says it all. His plan was to interview ex-girlfriends on camera, he hoped, and later analyze what they said and how they acted towards him. “It didn't turn out to be quite as straightforward as that,” Waitt explains. “To be honest, I didn't really think it through.”

But making the film made him a better person. “Due to a large number of comments made to me during the making of the film, I have been making a lot more of an effort with my personal appearance,” he acknowledged, “and I think I've achieved a reasonable degree of success in that area.” Whether or not he would have gotten those same comments without a camera, Waitt has definitely heard the feedback through the medium.

After successfully publishing two books on his experience jumpstarting the biodiesel industry, Josh Tickell realized that if he was going to try to shift the entire nation towards green energy, his message needed a more accessible medium – film. His doc Fields of Fuel follows his life as he tries to introduce the alternative fuel to the world. “I think people want to take action and don’t know how,” he commented

“[A film] puts something in a different context,” Tickell explained. “When you are in a theatre for 90 minutes, there is generally nobody talking, there are very few distractions – you are focused on what is in front of you. It’s a very special experience because your mind remembers a film in the same way it remembers an actual experience. We store films in the same part of our brain that we store real memories in.”

“It’s about doing something that resonates with my life,” said Morgan Spurlock, who is back at the Festival with Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?, his first film after Supersize Me (2004 Festival) in which he put himself and the American diet in front of the camera. Spurlock’s goal with his films is to “really have a first person experience while looking at some kind of an issue,” he said. “At the end of the day, I want to make a movie or a TV show that I want to end up watching. I don’t want it to be like medicine and I don’t want it to taste like spinach, I want it to be fun and entertaining. But at the same time, have some sort of a point. I think there is a way to do both.”

But that doesn’t mean that just because you’re the subject of your film that you can predetermine how it’s going to end. “There was somebody who gave me great advice when I was making Supersize Me,” Spurlock remembered. “’If the movie you end up with at the end is the exact movie you envisioned in the beginning then you didn’t listen to anybody.’ As long as I’m being honest with myself while I’m going on this trip, then I’m being honest with you.”

But if the point of a documentary is to record reality, doesn’t bringing in a camera in to record your life change that reality? How honest can any director be when they’re directing a movie about themselves? Chris Waitt used his life as fodder for his film from the beginning. “The initial presence of a camera is quite weird for everyone involved,” he said, “[but] after about 20 minutes in my company, my ex-girlfriends would usually become angry or annoyed at me and would forget about the camera.”

While Waitt’s approach isn’t every filmmaker’s way of relating to the camera, they all made their peace with the camera and their record of their version of reality. As a cinematographer with almost 40 features to her credit, Ellen Kuras said her goal is to be “as discreet as possible at times, more present at other times. I recognize that documentary is absolutely subjective, though some would like to think of documentary as objective,” she said. “For us, what the film says has been the compelling reality.”