docudrama

English

Alternative forms

• docu-drama

Etymology

Blend of documentary +‎ drama.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˈdɒkjʊˌdɹɑːmə/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

Noun

docudrama (plural docudramas)

1. A type of drama (a film, a television show, or a play) that combines elements of documentary and drama, to some extent showing real events and to some extent using actors performing recreations of documented events.

   Coordinate term: docufiction

   • 1999, Alan Rosenthal, editor, Why Docudrama?: Fact-fiction on Film and TV, SIU Press, →ISBN, page xv:

     In other words, docudrama covers an amazing variety of dramatic forms, bound together by two things. They are all based on or inspired by reality, by the lives of real people, or by events that have happened in the recent or not too distant past. Furthermore, they would seem to have a higher responsibility to accuracy and to truth than does fiction.

   • 2007 November 12, Mark Lawson, “The king of faction”, in The Guardian‎^[1]:

     And docudramas would be the perfect epitaph because, though Norman Kingsley Mailer dreamed of being the monarch of the American novel, he was finally the king of faction, the man whose greatest books, a nightmare for any librarian hoping neatly to classify as fiction or non-fiction, consolidated the now standard view that reporting is as important to storytelling as invention.

   • 2008 December 30, Bob Sommer, “The Education of David Frost”, in CounterPunch‎^[2]:

     “Docudrama” is by its nature a confusing genre—neither fish nor fowl, and thus lacking either taste or substance.

   • 2024 April 3, Stephen Roberts, “Bradshaw's Britain: destination Harrow”, in RAIL, number 1006, page 57:

     Fenny Compton featured in the recent TV docudrama Mr Bates vs The Post Office. It was where the first meeting of postmasters took place in 2009, organised by sub-postmaster Alan Bates to begin mounting a fight for justice in the now well-publicised Post Office scandal.

Derived terms

• docudramatize

 

Translations

drama that combines elements of documentary and drama

• Finnish: dokudraama, draamadokumentti
• French: docudrame (fr) m, docufiction (fr) f
• German: Dokudrama n
• Norwegian: dokudrama
• Thai: ละครสารคดี

See also

• faction

Spanish

Etymology

Borrowed from English docudrama.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /dokuˈdɾama/ [d̪o.kuˈð̞ɾa.ma]
• Rhymes: -ama
• Syllabification: do‧cu‧dra‧ma

Noun

docudrama m (plural docudramas)

1. (television) docudrama

Further reading

• “docudrama”, in Diccionario de la lengua española [Dictionary of the Spanish Language] (in Spanish), online version 23.8, Royal Spanish Academy [Spanish: Real Academia Española], 2024 December 10