"Our Father" Creatively Employs Documentary Modes With Persuasive Appeals.

New to Netflix is the investigative documentary Our Father by director Lucie Jourdan. The documentary follows a woman’s journey to finding her potential half-siblings. Knowing her parents used a sperm donor to conceive her, she seeks to uncover those siblings thanks to the new availability of at-home DNA testing. What unfolds is a convoluted story of corrupted religion, law, culture, and relationships, all due to the actions of one fertility doctor who used his sperm sample to “father” more than 90 children in the area of Indianapolis Indiana.

Jourdan weaves Our Father into a suspense-building series of events. Along the way, questions about the definition of rape under the law, the twisted views of radical Christians, and the integrity of genetic biodiversity in a concentrated area. To do this, Our Father uses tactics from the classic documentary The Thin Blue Line (dir. Errol Morris, 1989).

The Thin Blue Line used a combination of official testimony, interviews, and investigative filmmaking to prove a man’s innocence of the murder of a police officer. The film combines reenactments of different versions of the events to find the truth embedded in-between. This kind of reenactment documentary filmmaking is referred to as the expository mode. Documentary modes are a theory of documentary filmmaking coined by film critic and theoretician Bill Nichols.

Documentary modes can be equated to sub-genres of documentary or different tools to employ for the desired effect. The expository mode is the mode that sets up a specific rhetorical argument or point-of-view and can also resemble traditional narrative (fictional) filmmaking. The expository mode allows past events to be revisited and dramatized in a documentary film.

Jourdan directs reenactments throughout the film, which seek to detail and humanize past events and create an illusion of objectivity. As much as a filmmaker can attempt to remain neutral, the dominant expository mode of the documentary establishes a clear argument in support of some subjects and against others. It is impossible to remain completely objective when filming dramatized versions of past events when the very nature of the shoot requires creative interpretation.

The documentary also uses the subjects to stage reenacted events in which the subjects themselves participated. Due to the subjects’ heavy involvement as talking heads and fellow investigators, Our Father toes the line of performative documentary filmmaking, where the filmmaker inserts themselves as the subject of the documentary detailing their subjective experiences. While Jourdan herself, or any of the documentary’s crew, never appear onscreen, many of the participants who have investigated the case from the first revelations are injected into the filmmaking process as they participate in reenactments themselves.

The participatory mode requires filmmakers to participate with their subjects in the content and making of the documentary. However, the documentary crew does not inject themselves into the making of the documentary the film does not fall into the participatory mode. We never get to see how the filmmakers’ involvement would influence to creation of the documentary itself.

The subjects convey the argument clearly, following a linear timeline of events so that the overall messages of the documentary seem unclouded. Jourdan weaves an influential investigative documentary by employing the three rhetorical persuasive appeals necessary for any well-formed argument. Jourdan develops the ethos of the subjects using their experiences as the basis of the film in the expository mode. She develops pathos by using the subjects to recreate events in the performative mode. Finally, she develops logos through the employment of DNA testing data.

Checking off each box is necessary for a supported and substantial argument despite the questionable operation of its documentary modes. The operation of the expository and performative modes in Our Father is attention-catching and effective, if not entirely adhering to documentary conventions. The result is a chillingly personal story of deception and violation, ultimately calling into question the rights of women and their protection under the legal system.