Documentaries are now the most compelling thing on our screens. Julia Maile talks to five of the finest documentary-makers

A Frenchman living in Spain steals the identity of a missing 13-year-old American boy, fooling both the authorities and the boy’s family. If it was a Hollywood script, the storyline wouldn’t make it past the first reading. But proving that fact is often stranger than fiction, it’s absolutely true.

The story was the subject of the 2012 Bafta-winning documentary, The Imposter, which is just part of a growing body of work that shows truth is more compelling and more thought-provoking than anything scripted. Take Jiro Dreams Of Sushi, about an 85-year-old sushi chef who has never had a day off, and Man On Wire, which chronicles the man who danced on an illegal tightrope strung between the Twin Towers. Both of these films have reached cult status thanks to their quirkiness and originality.

The growing popularity of documentaries is part of a backlash against reality TV; we want to get the most out of our precious downtime. Watching documentaries is a more engaging, more cerebral experience, plus they’re far more interesting to dissect later with friends over a glass of pinot. The TV schedules reflect our obsession with this new age of reality; over 7.5 million of us tuned in to BBC1’s Africa each week, almost half of Channel 4’s top-rating shows of 2012 were factual, while documentary-makers such as Brian Cox have made formerly dry subjects like physics suddenly cool.

But watching documentaries is no longer confined to the sofa; we’re now just as likely to head to the cinema to see Searching For

Sugar Man (about the hunt for a long-lost Seventies music legend) as we are to watch the latest art house drama. The number of documentaries released at cinemas has almost doubled since 2007, and UK box office takings have increased from £1.6m to £11.1m. They’ve become the most talked about premieres at film festivals, with the LA Times writing, “As always with Sundance, the documentaries are the most reliable choice festival-goers can make.”

With factual fast overtaking fiction as the genre du jour, Stylist spoke to five of the industry’s brightest stars about searching for subjects, remaining objective and keeping Academy Awards on the mantelpiece.

Vanessa Berlowitz

From tacking whales in Antarctica to searching for snow leopards in the Himalayas, Vanessa Berlowitz’s role as producer on BBC1’s Frozen Planet (2012) and Planet Earth (2006) has seen her film in some of the world’s most extreme locations

The New Reality TV: Documentaries