This volume examines how documentary production increasingly develops through alternative infrastructures, emerging technologies, community engagement, and interdisciplinary creative practices outside mainstream screen industries.

Bringing together documentary makers, creative practitioners, and scholars from across the Southern and Eastern hemispheres, Outside the System: Southern and Eastern Documentary Production explores documentary theory and practice beyond the dominant industrial and cultural frameworks that have historically shaped the field. 

Using regional specificity as a starting point, the collection investigates the diverse documentary ecologies emerging across Australasia, Asia, Latin America, Africa, and Indigenous production contexts. Across discussions of immersive media, mobile documentary, vertical filmmaking, virtual and extended reality, collaborative storytelling, social innovation, and community-engaged practice, Outside the System demonstrates how documentary continues to evolve through creative, ethical, and technological experimentation beyond traditional institutional systems.

Across discussions of documentary production and distribution, social innovation, and creative innovation, the book combines scholarly analysis with case studies, creative research reflections, and practitioner perspectives. In doing so, it foregrounds documentary not simply as a cinematic form, but as a relational, interdisciplinary, and socially embedded practice shaped by collaboration, listening, reflexivity, and new modes of participation.

At the same time, the collection challenges Western-centric assumptions that continue to shape documentary scholarship, funding structures, exhibition cultures, and screen industries. Rather than positioning southern and eastern documentary practices as marginal alternatives, the book argues that these production cultures are generating some of the field’s most innovative approaches to storytelling, ethics, creative practice, and audience engagement.

Combining documentary theory, screen production research, creative practice methodologies, and practitioner insight, Outside the System makes a major contribution to documentary studies, global media studies, screen production research, and postcolonial media scholarship. The collection will be essential reading for scholars, filmmakers, educators, students, and readers interested in documentary practice, emerging media, creative research, and global screen cultures.