The Surprising—and Welcome—Comeback of Cinema Vérité

While reflecting on the artworks that moved me most this year, I did a double take: was I getting into cinéma vérité? In 2025? This couldn’t be. I’d always thought of myself as too impatient for raw footage and long, unedited takes—I liked my stories synthesized. And I remained unconvinced by the old utopian claims of the fly-on-the-wall view touted by those French filmmakers of the ’50s and ’60s: even as observational cinema tries to avoid manipulation, it is always inevitably shaped by a director, a team, an angle, a moment in time.

I was happy to be proven wrong—which is not to say that vérité has in fact been utopian all this time, only that now that its limits are generally accepted, it’s suddenly ripe for new and exciting use. Or so I felt while engrossed in—nay, addicted to—Sharon Hayes’s work in this year’s São Paulo Bienal. Her ongoing “Ricerche” series (begun in 2013) stages frank, roving conversations with various groups: queer senior citizens, a women’s tackle football team, students at a women’s college. Hers is an example of “framed cinéma vérité,” as it scalled, wherein subjects are invited to speak and the artist remains visible—mic in hand, questions heard—so that the encounter is foregrounded as part of the document.

What makes this work radical is also what makes it simple: these are real, unedited, human conversations, and Hayes invites you to sit in. She underscores that invitation physically, placing mismatched chairs in a semicircle before the screen—suggestive of a support group, a lunch break, a laidback hang that welcomes your arrival. Her subjects face this arc of chairs, closing the loop.

Watching “Ricerche,” I realized that I watch videos of people probably everyday—streaming a show, doomscrolling on Instagram, learning how to fix my fridge on YouTube—and none of them feel anything like Hayes’s contribution. Today, video is now arguably our main portal into the lives of others, collapsing space and time to allow us glimpses of experiences unlike our own. Yet so much of it is overly engineered to grab our internet-addled attention spans. Hayes gives us meandering conversations and unguarded curiosity, insisting that we are still capable of—indeed crave—connection beyond entertainment or utility.

Hayes’s interviews capture individuals’ stories, as well as the social warmth that shapes and sustains each individual. She films groups with evident intimacy, social circles willing to ask each other questions both tough and tender. In a world where videos are dominated by ring lights and filters, luxury looks and scripted bits, the candidness and intimacy—the flyaway hairs, the tangents, the lulls—feel unexpectedly touching and human. Watching the work, with all its authenticity, felt sadly like flexing a muscle I’d forgotten I had.

It’s a muscle worth toning. The personal and political ramifications of openness, curiosity, and listening feel hard to overstate. Jill Frank’s four-channel Bus (2025), on view at the Goat Farm arts center in Atlanta, similarly uses vérité-derived techniques in a way that feels tender, a rejoinder to its more clinical-feeling uses. Frank offers glimpses into adolescent ambition and awkwardness—keg stands and prom poses, yes, but also anxiety and naïve invincibility. Bus follows nine- to sixteen-year-olds on their daily ride to and from school in Georgia. In this yellow metal tube, an entire social world unfolds. Because the piece is installed on four screens that seem to situate you as the viewer in the aisle, you feel as if you are riding along, watching dramas and delights flicker past.

In a voiceover, the bus riders recall formative memories that unfolded in the gray pleather seats: a first kiss, a concussion, a friend breakup, a punch in the face. One kid describes rushing to get baptized after hearing about school shootings; another worries whether she’ll never grow up to have a house and kids of her own. A boy and girl hide under a sweatshirt and wriggle around; another kid wears headphones and cries. It’s Frank’s footage and edits, but in the voiceover, the kids steer the narrative, pushing vérité beyond voyeurism. And with lots to look at and listen to, you’re left to focus wherever you’d like. Anyone who ever rode an American school bus as a kid will wonder if the work is a window or a mirror. 

Today’s vérité is not only an antidote to the internet’s social siloing and its alienating overproduction, but to its misinformation machinery, too. Consider A Bunch of Questions With No Answers (2025), recently on view at SculptureCenter in New York, which edits found footage captured by the government into a work of vérité. Alex Reynolds and Robert M. Ochshorn craft this 23-hour epic entirely from questions asked at US State Department press briefings on its role in both Israel and Palestine, filmed between October 2023 and the end of the Biden administration in January 2025. The raw material is nothing more than journalists trying—often in vain—to obtain basic clarity from government spokesmen. 

Here the filmmakers intervene only to remove the officials’ evasive answers. From the journalists’ weary follow-ups, we infer the hollowness of the statements. Abrupt cuts turn the spokesmen’s words into syllable salads. Over time, the reporters become less concerned with confirming basic facts than with deeper pleas: “How do you know?” “What are you doing?”

It’s clear that the State Department hopes journalists—and by extension citizens—will dutifully parrot concise, evasive talking points. The film responds with refusal, a version of vérité that cuts out all that reeks of untruthfulness. This work is a different kind of observational cinema: one that, instead of exposing a buried truth, signals to those evading accountability that someone is watching; one that captures the textures of empire more than its pertinent facts.

Early handheld cinema imagined 16mm cameras as liberatory tools—clunky by today’s standards, but nimble enough to record life unscripted. That old dream feels almost quaint now. The problem today is not a lack of footage; it’s that there is too much to meaningfully hold. The press briefings in A Bunch of Questions With No Answers are publicly accessible, and the genocide they address has been all but live streamed. But the footage hasn’t yielded freedom.

None of these artists seem to believe otherwise. And yet, each understands something those early utopians also grasped: that there is still power in the simple act of sustained, unguarded looking. In an age designed to make us skim and summarize, vérité demands that we stay with the messiness of truth. Used well, the technique can still possess that indescribable heft factor of a truly special effect, one that stands out for its unusualness and tempts: don’t look away.