Guitarist Malis blasts out power chords as hardcore rock band Obstacle Upsurge thrash through their set. The drummer wears the headbanger’s obligatory studded denim jacket; the vocalist bellows rebellion to a capacity crowd at indie-arts nerve centre The Substation in Singapore. Afterwards, reflecting on the prejudiced music business, Malis says: “It’s not easy … there was a lot of [criticism] – about me wearing my hijab.” The all-female Obstacle Upsurge, still active, were a vital component of Singapore’s 1990s’ underground music landscape; and defiant shredder Malis sports her everyday Muslim attire on stage. This may surprise those more familiar with Singapore’s image as staid and suffocating. Scene Unseen , in which Obstacle Upsurge appear, and which is now in post-production, is part of the rise of what is, potentially, film and television’s most potent currency: the documentary. It isn’t the first sociological-musical study to scrutinise human behaviour, but it is part of a fast-expanding portfolio in which there seems to be an investigative work for every subject and subgenre, be it niche interest or global headline-grabber, available on the different streaming platforms. Closure of The Substation has Singapore’s arts community angry Is conservation your bag? Tune into Our Planet or Blackfish . Factory farming turning your stomach? Food, Inc. Want more music? Consider the life and troubled times of a Hong Kong heartthrob in Mystify: Michael Hutchence ; dance to the tune of festival fraud in Fyre ; or turn back the cultural clock in Tina . How about celebrities locked in conflict? Allen v. Farrow . True crime? Night Stalker , or perhaps I Don’t Like Mondays . History? Age of Samurai . Science? The Planets . Unsolved mysteries? Unsolved Mysteries . Photography-meets-mystery? Finding Vivian Maier . Current affairs? Capitalism: A Love Story . Fashion? Westwood: Punk, Icon, Activist . Sport? See file marked All or Nothing … Documentaries’ emergence from an artistic straitjacket into what some consider a golden age has been followed closely by one of the chief creative forces behind Scene Unseen . Dr Mark Ravinder Frost, writer and an executive producer, is aiming for international festival exposure for a film that, while lacking in budget, shares many characteristics with the new breed of documentary. There’s this new wave of creativity: all these filmmakers who went to art school have previously been limited in what they can do, but have suddenly found that in a documentary they can be as experimental as they like. Dr Mark Ravinder Frost, Associate Professor in Public History at University College London “In the old days,” says Frost from his home office in Cambridge, England, “a director would go and shoot months, sometimes years, of footage, then work with an editor and turn it into a story. But increasingly, documentaries are borrowing from cinematic techniques and a dramatic structure is now a key part of a successful documentary: beginning, middle, end, twist.” Frost’s is a familiar name in academic and documentarian circles in Southeast Asia. A former assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong, he was previously content director and senior scriptwriter for the History Gallery of the National Museum of Singapore, and has co-created, written and produced a host of documentary series on Asian history and politics. He is now Associate Professor in Public History at University College London, teaching a Master of Arts programme, a pillar of which is documentary making. Frost believes that, while a dramatic structure gives documentaries a solid foundation, there are many other reasons why they “are so much more bankable and successful commercially than ever and have such big audiences”. Industry statistics support this shift. Quoting recent Nielsen streaming ratings for the United States, Peter Hamilton Consultants, established scrutineers of the “documentary film and television sector”, say that true-crime-meets-big-cats series Tiger King easily outranked other Netflix series, including fictional crime drama Ozark, in terms of total minutes streamed. Tiger King also left historical drama The Crown (starring Oscar winner Olivia Colman) in the dust – a series that cost many millions of dollars more to make. “There has been a wonderful transformation, thanks to investment from the streaming services,” Frost says. “There’s this new wave of creativity: all these filmmakers who went to art school have previously been limited in what they can do, but have suddenly found that in a documentary they can be as experimental as they like. “There was a clear division between documentary and feature-length, dramatic film, but the line is really blurred now,” he says. “Twenty or 30 years ago, documentary-making was a very narrow, under-resourced world. Documentaries were very worthy and caught up in quite pompous ideas about truth and authenticity.” Few documentary-makers can have a sharper perspective on the genre – whether scripted, unscripted, historical or dramatised – than Britain’s Justin Hardy. With a catalogue of credits as director, producer or writer of, among many others, miniseries documentaries ( Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance ) and documentaries ( The Green Park ) Hardy agrees that documentaries have largely shaken off their former fustiness. “What often happens is that documentaries are separated from the glamour of drama,” he says. “Suddenly they become a bit dry and are run by people wearing suede shoes and oatmeal ties in some corner of the BBC. They lose their lustre. “Fact and fiction together [are] really compelling,” he says in a video call from his London home. “So your dramas are increasingly [productions such as] Chernobyl , which is information meets entertainment; and now documentary-wise you’ve got information meeting entertainment. So it’s the perfect combination.” Hardy agrees that this evolution would have been impossible without the advent of streaming. “The streaming services are central to this new ‘golden age’. [In Britain,] the BBC, Channel 4 and ITV will turn into something else, we don’t know what. They’re playing catch-up all the time, trying to figure out what the streaming services are doing; they’re copying them, so they are no longer originators,” he says. Chinese live-streamers binge drink till they pass out or vomit to gain fans “They would not have had the entrepreneurialism to drive this golden age, which is coming out of the muscularity of a bunch of transatlantic cool cats.” For Hardy, the timeline is clear. “The BBC and Channel 4 supported documentaries and had a previous golden age, until about 2010,” he says. “Since then, we’ve had total and utter devotion to drama, which has become all-encompassing. And drama has such a big appetite that when money flows into it, there’s almost nothing left for anything else, [even though] documentaries are much cheaper.” But Hardy sees a turning tide. “In the past four or five years, documentaries have started to steal some of drama’s clothes back,” he says. “It’s begun to say, ‘We can do some dramatisation; we can cut our shows in a way that they have dramatic shape, with dramatic uplift. We’re going to use editing devices that feel really cool and we’re going to shoot things so they look really beautiful.’ “So, stealing clothes from drama and applying them to true stories? True crime was the first, 2010-ish, big subgenre there, doing really well. Sport followed, with Michael Jordan and The Last Dance ; and All or Nothing … ” Nor is he finished with sport. “My sons, students, are asking me, ‘Have you seen these ?’ as though they’re the first documentaries ever made,” he says. “It’s because they combine the sports they’re interested in with proper narrative. “The [recent] Bahrain Grand Prix was boring; but if you turn it into a documentary and give it dramatic shape, and you’ve got a head-to-head between two drivers in the same team, suddenly it’s much more exciting.” Might documentaries supersede live-action sport? “That’s a fair point,” says Hardy. “Sport must learn from this. Formula 1 is notoriously slow in working out what to do with the fastest, potentially most exciting sport on the planet … they’ve managed to make it f***ing boring for years! ‘Is it soft tyres or medium tyres?’ What we want to know is who’s going to scratch whose eyes out to get to the front of their team! But now we’ve got Formula 1: Drive to Survive and there will be parts four, five …” Behind the new artistic freedoms and shimmering graphics, however, there still lurks an elephant in the cutting room. To what extent, compared to documentaries of old, are today’s productions relied upon for journalistic truth? “With Michael Moore, for example, documentaries became a new medium for polemics,” says Frost. “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. And although polemics aren’t necessarily untrue, they have a particular story to tell – change the world, even if some facts are debatable.” “If you mix entertainment and information you’ll end up on a different trajectory,” adds Hardy. “More money causes more executive pressure – and that causes the truth to be squeezed out.”