How to Invent Reality

Danish director Jon Bang Carlsen makes documentaries that hover between fiction and reality. In How to Invent Reality he amplifies the method used for his film It's Now or Never. He feels that a documentary filmmaker does not necessarily register only what he sees, but that he can also invent reality, as it were. Jon Bang Carlsen compares the camera with an eye that registers everything, but is itself unable to see. By using the images that the eye has registered, the filmmaker then makes reality visible. Reality as it occurs may then be too limited. For that reason It's Now or Never, a film about a bachelor's search for a wife, contains dramatised scenes. For example, the two men who are presented as friends in the film, had never met in reality before playing in this film.