Film theorist and historian Olga Davydova, who taught for many years at one of the once most progressive faculties in Russia — the liberal arts and sciences department at St. Petersburg State University, which produced many active film theorists and critics today — makes an ambitious attempt to revise not only the entire history of documentary film and various strategies for understanding it, but also the ontology of film itself, drawing a route not only through classic films, but also not forgetting about the unobvious secret masterpieces of this type of cinema, which make up a huge part of its history. Much has been written about documentary film, but no one in Russian film studies has yet undertaken such a dizzying journey through the history of its analysis and various theoretical approaches to its consideration — from André Bazin to Jacques Rancière and the latest examples of decolonial film and video essays. Olga Davydova's book is a compendium of current film theory, written in a language accessible to a wide audience, which can only be compared in Russian to the famous translation of the book by Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener.