MIX-UP ou MELI-MELO (France/1985)

Francoise Romand's debut tells the true story of two women who raised each other's daughters after the babies were mixed-up by the staff of a small maternity clinic in Nottingham, England. The story begins in 1936, reaches a crucial point two decades later when it came into the open, and continues until the daughters turned 48. Mix-Up is not a conventional documentary. It certainly includes interviews and family-owned photographs and videos. But Romand goes deeper into themes of identity, affiliation and representation by means of tableaux vivants, scenes that recreate past events using the real subjects, posed portraits in different configurations, and scenes in which two child actresses are used. Mix-Up achieves novelistic detail within 63-min duration by approaching the themes from multiple angles and appraising her subjects from a multiplicity of points of view.

The truth is that the border between fictional films and documentary has always been permeable. Nanook of the North (1922), considered to be a seminal work of documentary cinema, consists almost exclusively of recreations made according to the directions of Robert Flaherty. Fiction has a knack for intruding into the documentary intentions of filmmakers, and viceversa. The work of Francoise Romand belongs to a tradition of movies that consciously and vigorously experiment by combining aspects of both fiction and documentary. These include Jean Rouch's "docu-fictions", in which he had the subjects of his documentary footage create a fictional voice-over, and the work of Peter Watkins, Abbas Kiarostami (especially Close-Up) and others.