Mock-documentary and False Documentary

A 'mock-documentary' is a fictional text that uses the documentary codes and conventions to look and sound as a documentary text, which challenges a special status of the documentary and suggests a new relationship between the public and the documentary genre, putting to the test spectators' abilities to differentiate between truth and fiction. The authoress presents the definition and characteristic features of 'mock-documentary' and introduces the reader to the views of Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, the authors of the first monograph of the sub-genre. In 'Faking it: Mock-documentary and the subversion of factuality' (2001), the two identified the probable 'pioneers' of 'mock-documentary', set contexts essential for reflections of the form, and, first and foremost, divided 'mock-documentary' into three categories, depending on the type of relation a given text builds with factual discourse (parody, critique and deconstruction). She discusses cases of reality manipulation in documentary films and numerous examples of false TV documentaries in the 1990s in order to point to the differences between 'mock-documentary' and 'false documentary'.