Robert Flaherty

Widely regarded as the inventor of documentary cinema, Robert Flaherty approached filmmaking with an ethnographer’s eye. Born in 1884, Flaherty became the father-figure of documentary with his Nanook of the North, the first commercially successful feature length documentary film. Although nothing in his later life equaled its success, he continued making films such as Moana the film that became the reason for the introduction of the term ‘documentary’ from John Grierson.