It is an enduring dilemma in art: the question of whether the real world, in all its complexity, is better understood through reportage or fiction, or through hybrids of the two. The question particularly exercises documentarists now, when the political reality of the globalised world is increasingly complex and elusive, not least due to the relentless online traffic of truths, lies and indeterminacies. Perhaps for those very reasons, we increasingly demand some leavening element of entertainment to help smooth our path toward understanding. As ‘true crime’ series flourish on Netflix and elsewhere, even the most rigorous documentarists must ask themselves whether they should aspire to presenting truth in unembellished form, or whether it needs to be presented accessibly as something closer to ‘reality’ – using that word in the ‘reality show’ sense, in which actuality always comes to some degree fictionalised.