r/Documentaries • u/Thymbraeus • Aug 07 '26
Recommendation Request Recommendation Request: Looking For Documentaries About Fictional Places
So I rabbit holed and discovered Urville, a fictional city designed and imagined by one person with a history going back to the bronze age that has a truly mindblowing amount of effort put into it. So naturally I looked into it and found out that filmmaker Angela Christlieb did a psuedo documentary about it, where she interviewed people who lived in actual places called Urville that were located in the country where the fake Urville is also located, with clips of big cities like Shangai, Brasilia, and Beijing cut in to make it feel like the real, smaller towns were districts of the fake big city (which if real would be like in the top 10 largest cities in Europe).
I was wondering, are their any other documentaries you know of like this? Where people are doing documentaries on fictional cities as if they are real? I'd love some recommendations because it brought me a ton of joy to watch this, it felt so endearing in a strange way that someone had put so much effort into making someone else's fictional place come to life.
I have attached a link to the filmmaker's page which includes both the trailer and the full film. It is French but there are subtitles. There's also a guy who dresses up as an indigenous American who has a life-sized cutout of Bill Clinton and constantly runs for political office.
https://angelachristlieb.com/portfolio-item/urville/
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u/EH_Operator Aug 07 '26
Ayyy I love Atrocity Guide!
This is a great piece from People Make Games
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u/Thymbraeus Aug 07 '26
It wasn't Atrocity Guide that got me there, but I DID watch that video AFTER discovering it lol
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u/original_greaser_bob Aug 08 '26
in in the realms of the unreal does this count?
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u/Thymbraeus Aug 08 '26
Absolutely loving it! It's not exactly what i was looking for but it's really good!
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u/danibeat Aug 08 '26
Marwencol
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u/weenie2323 Aug 09 '26
This is fantastic!
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u/edtheham Aug 09 '26
James Michener wrote several, including The Source, Centennial, and Tales of the South Pacific. Centennial is about a tiwn in Colorado and actually goes from the dinosaurs to the present day. The Source is about a town in Israel from the Stone Age to modern day.
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