Aufderheide says, “documentary movies are about real life: they are not real life they are not even windows onto real life. They are portraits of real life, using real life as their raw material...You might then say: documentary is a movie that does its best to represent real life and that doesn’t manipulate it...and yet, there is no way to make a film without manipulating the information. As Flaherty acknowledges, “one often has to distort a thing to catch its true spirit.”