Guido (Stranger in Paradise) is being confrontational in a new way: by walking up to people’s houses and filming them without speaking. He groups the chosen encounters by the type of reaction, so in early scenes everyone he meets is standoffish or defensive or aggressive, then a section of people who figure he’s up to something harmless and play along. The woman seen below introduces him to her baby, saying it’s also deaf & mute. It gets more tense than The Balcony Movie when people start letting him into their houses. One guy is very easygoing but warns Guido that the neighborhood groupchat has called the cops on him. In the end he’s making repeat visits to known-friendly houses. It’s kind of the essence of documentary, showing up and letting the subjects control what happens. Guido has a new one set in Sudan which premiered over a year ago.

from Mads Mikkelsen’s Cinema Scope article on interventionist documentaries:

The true protagonist of A Man and a Camera, however, is the latter half of the titular duo. There is a basic understanding at work here that the very act of filming is transgressive, and that being filmed generates an alienating self-consciousness in the unwilling subject of the camera’s attention. In any social situation, the presence of a camera makes for an uneven game; through his repeated acts of passive-aggressive monomania, Hendrikx simply amplifies this dynamic to study its effects.