Factual Film: Catfish (Spoilers in 5th and 6th Paragraph)

Catfish is a 2010 90 minute documentary by directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. It features the two following their friend and colleague, Yaniv (Nev) Schulman (Ariel's brother) regarding his relationship with somebody he met online.


After his photograph was featured in a newspaper and shared online, a girl from another state contacts budding New York photographer Yaniv Schulman regarding their interest in art, which forms relationships with the family. Things seem too good to be true, and Yaniv is interested in finding out why they refuse to meet with him.

Catfish, in general, is going to have you interested in what seems like a film plot, which makes it all the more interesting to see it progress as factual footage. A lot of films recently copy documentation styles using "found footage" as a new found horror cliche, and the style looks like it's truly copied from films like this, that do show footage by people who aren't industry professionals actually trying to solve their own mystery. You become interested in the same problems Nev has in trying to piece together the puzzle, and, without providing spoilers for how it ends (which is something you wouldn't expect in a documentary) you almost feel sympathetic rather than angry towards how things end up turning out, as if you can almost relate despite feeling like she did some generally harmful, leaving you with this mixture of emotions that documentaries don't tend to leave you with, and would be much better found in a drama of some sort. While it's not going to give you this massive burst of knowledge like Louis Theroux or the previously mentioned Lift, and it's not going to give you this plot to think about for weeks that shows like BoJack Horseman and Breaking Bad leave you with, it's going to leave you feeling like you've experienced a journey with a real person, which is something unique to this film.

The film was fairly objective, not providing any particular opinions about anything, more interested in telling a story, making it an interactive and/or reflective documentary that is more interested in telling a story and getting the information out there than trying to conduct research or observe things, because it is a real person's story rather than a factual film to give opinions.

At the start of the film, Nev states that his brother should "Set it up, organise a time with me, put together some materials, emails" if he wants to document the story. Oddly enough, (spoilers) this is what it turns out had been being done to him all along by the woman on the other end, organising a series of elaborate hoaxes with which to trick Nev into making the woman feel more confident and happy. It is a quote that, if you think about, shows that Nev really did believe the conversations were genuine at that point in filming, that was likely shown to reflect on how the events later evolved from there to show that Nev had been given what he asked for all along, and how his opinions changed as his suspicions grew.

If the documentary had been planned, they arranged all these dates and emails, then the aesthetic of the documentary would have changed, and some of the scenes that have this sense of intensity to them, such as (spoilers) approaching the farm or the house for the first time, or when he approaches Angela, would essentially lose that feeling of authenticity and journey that the film provides, making it look more as if it was just a setup or a general announcement to people, which would lose the charm and interest of the film for me. It provides an insight at a different kind of documentary that the world could really appreciate more of, in my opinion.

Catfish has been part of the start of my second year of college, in which we will be making factual documentary films with probable inspiration from the film.