Scholarship on utopias in film has so far focused exclusively on dystopias – but utopias are about criticizing the present rather than telling a gripping story, and Utopia and Reality looks into propaganda and documentary films for depictions of better worlds.

Table of Contents List of Illustrations Contributors Acknowledgments Andrea Reiter and Simon Spiegel Introduction: Utopian Realities Lyman Tower Sargent and Simon Spiegel Reality and Utopia: A Conversation with Lyman Tower Sargent Part 1: Tracing Utopia Susanna Layh Utopia Revisited: Reading Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera in the Light of the Utopian Tradition Peter Seyferth Neither Fact Nor Fiction: Made in Secret as a Utopian Education in Desire Simon Spiegel The Utopia of the Caliphate: Reading ISIS Propaganda Videos as Utopian Texts Part 2: Alternative Documentary Politics Matthew Holtmeier Living and Dying with Water: Indigenous Histories and Critical Bioregionalism in The Pearl Button Andrea Reiter Prospectivity in Political Documentaries Chelsea Wessels Practicing Hope: Ecofeminism, Documentary and Community Engagement Part 3: New Forms of Documentary Activism Daniel Schwartz, Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou, Alfredo Brillembourg, Hubert Klumpner Trans-Utopia: Documenting Real and Imagined Cities Dale Hudson Post-Utopian Interventions by Students: Interactive Documentary and Micro-Revolutions Jane M. Gaines Documentary Dreams of Activism and the Arab Spring List of Illustrations

* Scholarship on utopias in film has so far focused exclusively on dystopias - but utopias are about criticizing the present rather than telling a gripping story * Utopia and Reality looks into propaganda and documentary films for depictions of better worlds. * This volume brings together researchers from two fields that have so far seen little exchange - documentary studies and utopian scholarship * Covers a wide range of films from Soviet avant-garde to propaganda videos for the terror organisation ISIS, and from political-activist to ecofeminist and interactive documentaries.

Simon Spiegel is a research associate at the Department of Film Studies of the University of Zurich, and Privatdozent at the University of Bayreuth. He is project manager in the ERC Advanced Grant research project FilmColors. Andrea Reiter is a film scholar and documentary filmmaker. Marcy Goldberg is a film historian, university lecturer, editor and translator.