Utopia and Reality: Documentary, Activism and Imagined Worlds

Since publication of Thomas More‘s Utopia more than five hundred years ago, there has been a steady stream of literary works that depict a better world; positive utopias in film, however, have been scarce. There is a consensus that utopias in the Morean tradition are not suited to fiction film, and research has accordingly focused on dystopias. Starting from the insight that utopias are always a critical reaction to the deficits of the present, Utopia and Reality takes a different approach by looking into the under-researched area of propaganda and documentary films for depictions of better worlds. This volume brings together researchers from two fields that have so far seen little exchange – documentary studies and utopian scholarship – and covers a wide range of films from Soviet avant-garde to propaganda videos for the terror organisation ISIS, from political-activist to ecofeminist and interactive documentaries.