“…As Arroyo Quiroz et al (2020: 163) state succinctly, documentary scholarship is generally ‘centred on the medium’s truth claims and evaluates films according to their ability to articulate a persuasive and well-documented discourse about the “real” world’, whether films are seen to work through mimesis or to construct reality as an ideological effect, while the discourse of useful cinema ‘decentre[s] the truth claim that sustains the documentary project’ and shifts the focus to the work of social actors such as filmmakers, intellectuals, artists, and institutions ‘translating or mediating institutional discourses to specific audio-visual narratives comprehensible to audiences’ (p. 164, emphasis in original). This distinction between scholarly approaches is extended, in Honess Roe’s (2013: 4) work, to institutional and public discourse: for her, a documentary must be framed and received as such, and does not include useful cinema such as educational and public service films. However, these distinctions are not immutable: while Child Soldiers is not generally framed as a documentary, when I proposed the label to Boyter (2018, personal communication) because of the research questions I had in mind, he agreed immediately that it could apply.…”