requisite for a documentarian. He hopes the film will be distributed in Brazil but it's a complicated process, the details of which he didn't feel at liberty to discuss. I could only imagine this would have to do with direct physical threats to him and/or his family. Being a documentarian, Kohn is subject to having his access justifiably scrutinized. Most of the questions revolved around how he secured interviews or where he found footage. This struck me only because I had just read Paul Arthur's fine essay "Art of the Real" in the current issue of Film Comment (March/April, 2007), which I heartily recommend to anyone concerned with the aesthetics and ethics of documentary filmmaking. I feel Kohn has been straightforward about disclaiming his film as a political documentary. He suffers no pretensions. But this places him in a sensitive contemporary category, precisely because he won an award for best documentary. Though writing about Michael Moore's film Roger & Me , Paul Arthur's concerns seemed applicable to Kohn's work precisely because Kohn has defended Manda Bala by its entertainment value, or his wish to have it be entertaining. As I interview more and more documentarians, this keeps coming up, this wish to be entertaining, which Arthur argues is a hazardous trend in documentary filmmaking. Arthur writes that assaults on corporate arrogance raise "increasingly important questions about legitimate uses of 'dramatization' in nonfiction. In other words, when does factual or scenic maneuvering perpetrated in the name of social insight -- or