Come for Mavis Beacon, stay for the documentarians.

Because documentaries traffic in “truth,” who the documentarians are plays a fundamental role in how they shape the audience’s conception of the documentary’s “truth.”

As such, when it comes to explicitly autobiographical documentaries like Seeking Mavis Beacon, the filmmaking choices found in the documentary, made by the documentarians, can’t help but adopt a meta layer, because these decisions reveal who the documentarians are.