Confession (2001)

" I want to make a confession. I used my camera as a weapon to manipulate a now defenseless person and she has been haunting me ever since," declares filmmaker Marina Petrovskaia in her pioneering documentary, Confession. Petrovskaia journeys to Germany with the explicit purpose of confronting her ailing aunt and coaxing her into disclosing an unsavory episode in their family's history. Shot in black and white, with generous use of archival images and artfully placed text, Petrovskaia challenges conventional documentary techniques by purposely manipulating interviews and incorporating experimental devises to disjoint the disturbing narrative reluctantly offered by her aunt. While chronicling her confessional, the filmmaker calls into question her own moral authority over her investigation and, ultimately, presents a probing critique on the ethics of non-fiction filmmaking.