Hundreds of hours of a stranger’s home movies were edited into a rip-roaring, fake documentary about a family on the run

Text Trey Taylor

Caught in a YouTube wormhole, filmmaker Dean Fleischer-Camp discovered a trove of one stranger’s unedited family footage, each video with 80 views or less. They belonged to someone named Gary, who had unceremoniously shoved his camcorder into the face of his irritated wife and his two kids at home and during the family’s travels. It was innocent enough – boring, even. Fleischer-Camp became addicted. He asked Gary’s permission to use the hundreds of hours of footage he’d uploaded to YouTube for a project. What exactly, he didn’t yet know. Eventually, it would become Fraud, a fucked-up parable about a family struggling financially who commits a crime and hits the road. Together with editor Jonathan Rippon, he’d take hours of home video and edit it into a warped Bonnie and Clyde narrative. It’s a compelling, edge-of-your-seat tale of one family’s dark descent into a life of crime. Except that none of this ever happened. At screenings of Fraud during Toronto’s Hot Docs festival, audiences stood up after the film and called him a “con artist” and a “liar” for labelling his work “documentary”. How could it be a documentary if it wasn’t true? Fleischer-Camp, who has enjoyed viral success before with his Marcel the Shell With Shoes On short films, shrugs off the haters. Reached by telephone over the American Thanksgiving weekend, he extolled the elastic definition of documentary and insists that Fraud is, in fact, some version of the truth.

How did the idea for Fraud come about in the first place? Dean Fleischer-Camp: The idea for Fraud came from being an editor when I was younger and feeling it wasn’t very creatively powerful. So I started playing around with ways that you could recontextualise the footage that you’ve been given, making a little game out of it. So that’s where I got the idea that maybe you can make an entire feature out of somebody’s footage that tells a completely different story than what actually happened. How did you find this footage? Dean Fleischer-Camp: I don’t really remember, it must have been a suggested video based on something else (I was watching). It was just one of those YouTube holes that you find yourself going down. I was a casual fan of Gary’s footage before I even thought about making a project out of it. It was almost mesmerising to watch the way he documented his world. How long did it take you from start to finish? Dean Fleischer-Camp: I think it took about a year and a half from start to finish, but that was very off-and-on. When you first asked permission to use these clips, what was the reaction? Dean Fleischer-Camp: It took a little bit of convincing, because for someone to contact you out of the blue on the internet and to ask if they can use your footage is… Probably the wise response is, ‘No way.’ I found him on Facebook. I showed him some of my work, and some of it he had already seen, so he was pretty game. I didn’t have an idea of what it would be when we first spoke, so there was this vague thing of, like, ‘Could we make some kind of video project that uses your footage but tells a different story from it?’ He was really into that; it speaks highly of his creative willingness that he was game for this, that he was excited by it. We weren’t sure what the story was gonna be, so when the story became more about them committing a crime, and became this Bonnie and Clyde story, I got in touch with them and said, ‘Hey, it’s sort of started to take this dark turn. You guys being criminals on the run, is that cool?’ And he was OK with that. He watched the movie and the family was really into it, so I think I got lucky that they were so game.

Courtesy of the filmmaker