Current Research

Book project tentatively titled Documentaries Against the Law: Evidence, Affect, and Reflexivity 

The past two decades have seen an explosion in documentary films focusing on criminal trials, wrongful convictions, and unsolved crimes. Where traditional trial and true-crime documentaries provide certainty and closure because the case is solved and the criminal punished, this new wave of documentaries places the legal system under scrutiny. This project provides a detailed examination of the structural and aesthetic affinities between trials and documentaries through a close analysis of contemporary Spanish “juridical documentaries,” films that re-examine trials that resulted in miscarriages of justice. What constitutes evidence in these documentaries? What interpretative frames do they deploy to present facts and events? What alternative images of law and justice do they construct? Interrogating trial and documentary together helps us better understand the complex relation between evidence and narrative, facts and truth, knowledge and reality, and law and justice.