The Documentary Filmmaker’s Intuition: Creating Ethical and Impactful Non-Fiction Films

This book is an introduction to the art and craft of documentary film making with a focus on ethics and impact from development through distribution. Author Shannon Walsh explores point-of-view storytelling, writing for non-fiction, and the art of social change documentary.

Shannon Walsh is a filmmaker, an Associate Professor in Film Production at the University of British Columbia, and a Research Associate at the South African Research Chair in Social Change at the University of Johannesburg. She has written and directed six feature documentaries. Her films have been theatrically released, broadcast on networks such as ARTE, Al-Jazeera, CBC and Netflix, and screened at film festivals and museums globally. She has also published two edited books and many articles and chapters exploring issues such as inequality, social justice and visual methods. She was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2020, and awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Art in 2023.