“A documentary must be cinematic, a dramatization of daily life. It must make
people think and in an extreme militant sense, it can agitate. In form, it can go
from newsreel to fiction. Authenticity, after all, isn’t necessarily truth. Fiction
can be truer.”

Joris Ivens (Georg Henri Anton Ivens), born 1898 in the Netherlands, was a Dutch director who explored leftist social and political concerns. Ivens left working for his family after receiving acclaim for two of his films, The Bridge (1928) and Rain (1929). His successes resulted in an invitation to lecture in the Soviet Union, where he made Song of Heroes (1932). In Spain with the writer Ernest Hemingway he made The Spanish Earth (1937), an anti-Franco report on the Spanish Civil War. His film “The Power and the Land” (1940) documents the New Deal’s rural electrification program. He passed away in Paris in 1989.