Most of the more popular films that are viewed in theaters today are scripted stories meant for audience entertainment. These films are based on actors and their fictional stories in their fictional worlds. Documentaries on the other hand are about reality. The films are about what actually happened to real people in the real world. Since there is this difference, documentaries have their own selection of genres which differ from fictional films. As Nichols puts it, “they are made with different assumptions about purpose, they involve a different quality of relationship between filmmaker and subject, and they prompt different sorts of expectations from audiences”. Despite these differences fictional and documentary films do share some similarities. For instance some documentaries use some fictional tools of film making such as scripted performances.

While many people believe “Nanook of the North” to be the first documentary, there are many who are skeptical of this assumption. The reason that this is questioned is because many of the scenes from this film were set-up by the director. For instance the seal scene did not actually happen they had people off the shot pulling at the other end of the string and the seal they claimed to catch was already dead. Nichols describes documentaries as “These films challange assumptions and alter perceptions. They see the world anew and do so in inventive ways”. He goes on to say that this story is a way of life that the Eskimo, Nanook, takes on  even if this is no longer his way of life. Because of this, the film can be portrayed as fictional or documentary. There are two ways to identify this as a documentary, the first is that even those these are no longer the ways of the Inuit they do closely relate to the way they used to live. The second is that the spirit of the character Nanook is in Allakariallak whom has lived the life of an Inuit and therefor can embody the character as if he were the character.