 A film in three minutes. The Thin Blue Line. What are some of your favourite documentaries and why? Do they expose burning injustices at the hands of bad actors or nation-states? Do they shine a light on never-before-revealed truths which have been buried or gone unnoticed? Do they push the boundaries of visual style and editing techniques not yet seen before? Or have they done all of the above? Errol Morris' Oscar-winning The Thin Blue Line acts as one of the best examples of documentary filmmaking, revolutionising not only the approach and style of documentaries for a generation, but changing also the life of its subject. Released in 1988, the film documents the conviction of Randall Dale Adams, a labourer looking for a job in Dallas, Texas, who, in 1977, was sentenced to death and later life imprisonment for the killing of Texas police officer Robert Wood the previous year. Adams, who protested his innocence from day one, would be forced to serve 12 years of his sentence for a crime he did not commit, whilst the real perpetrator, Juan David Harris, would be imprisoned for other crimes at a later date and features in the film. What follows in Morris' astute interviewing of the cases witnesses, attorneys and commentators is a tragic miscarriage of American justice, revealing to us the ease in which innocent people can suddenly be consumed by the apparatus of the law at the hands of aggressive state actors. Morris would break from the previously held documentary conventions and forge new ground by shooting recreations of the moment of the murder, each one based on the differing testimony from multiple witnesses. These recreations, a Rashomon-esque technique later used by countless productions, pushes the film beyond the frame backdrop of the interviewees and highlights an artistic approach of presenting facts and figures to the audience. This style is combined with the ingenious collaboration from composer Philip Glass, whose ethereal soundtrack for the film works majestically with Morris' visuals, creating an uneasy soundscape that neither soothes nor discomforts the viewer's ears. On Morris' critics, who accused him of using artistic license when shooting re-enactments of the murder, the director has said, I don't believe truth is conveyed by style and presentation. I don't think that if it was grainy and full of handheld material, it would be any more truthful. Oddly enough, people don't want truth. They want to avoid having to think. If anybody really thinks that truth and style are one and the same, that if you obey a set of documentary conventions, truth magically pops out, well, that's not the way it works. Whether you agree or disagree with Morris' approach to documenting real-life stories, the film blue line's impact on cinema and television is undeniable. The director's tireless research and unique presentational style, whilst biased in the favour of the wrongly convicted Adams, pushed the limits of what audiences had come to expect from what documentaries could achieve. And although Adams would later take Umbridge with Morris' perceived ownership of his story, the fact that his conviction was overturned speaks volumes about the impact a documentary can have, not just on the subject, but on us as the audience as well.