The Dakumentary vs. prestige TV?

Well, it's prestige streaming nowadays, but you get the point. The Dakumentary is essentially another streaming show, regardless of which format you believe it to be. Looking at RNZ's top TV of 2025 list made me realise that the Dakumentary is a totally different thing, even to the reality doco series. It's like a bizarre art film amongst all this commodified drivel. I mean, a lot of it comes down to the combination of different formats and styles of footage, from news bulletins to interviews to verite footage to AI animation and conventional Premiere Pro VFX. - The other major difference is that the Dakumentary plays each and every clip to completion, rather than merely sourcing the best extracts (unless it's footage that I cut). That's probably the most radical thing. - When we first met the Film Commission in 2018, Dale was really down on the idea of a political film, saying that politicians aren't trustworthy and implying that our cannabis films, with several thousand views, weren't cinema. Then RNZ-TVNZ passed us over for the Joint Innovation Fund in that same period. So, yeah, it's a bit of a sore point in 2025 that my political film made me internationally renowned as a filmmaker, yet people in the industry are behaving as if it was a fluke, and not the application of an aesthetic agenda to a pressing issue. An agenda that we'd been laying out since 2018, and was fully formed by 2022.