There are many ways that filmmakers have made use of the documentary form to tell a story. One that has come into favour in recent times has been the "mockumentary". One of the more recent attempts that achieved notoriety was, of course, The Blair Witch Project, but more often than not the mode is employed for the potential it offers for humour and satire.
Meet The Ruttles, featuring Eric Idle, was a send-up of the whole Beatles phenomenon and one of the first full-length mockumentaries that I know of. But it wasn't until Rob Reiner made This Is Spinal Tap that the format gained wide acceptance. Since then amateur theatre groups, dog shows, and folk musicians have all been subject to the "mock" treatment with various degrees of success.
The secret to a good mockumentary is its ability to present the ridiculous or the unbelievable in as realistic a manner as possible. Every attempt must be made to make things as believable as possible in order for the absurdity of the situation to shine through.
In the new Cinema Libre Studio release The Hole Story we are presented with a mockumentary in the black comedy/satire territory. But there's an added twist in that the line between reality and movie is blurred almost beyond recognition.
Writer/director Alex Karpovsky has created the story of wannabe TV documentary/human interest show director Alex Karpovsky who has given up his job editing karaoke videos to pursue his dream of selling a pilot to cable television. Provincial Puzzles will travel around the United States seeking out mysterious events that have happened in small town America and try to come up with answers to the riddles posed in each case.
For his pilot Alex has chosen to go to Brainerd, Minnesota in the middle of the winter, where, in spite of temperatures well below zero Fahrenheit, for the second year in a row a mysterious hole has opened in the ice on North Long Lake just outside of town. With his savings, Alex hires a crew and heads out to Brainerd only to discover that two days before he arrived the hole had frozen over again.
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