Since 2003, Pietro Marcello has authored several nonfiction films, including Crossing the Line (Il passaggio della linea, 2007), The Mouth of the Wolf (La bocca del lupo 2009), The Silence of Pelešjan (Il silenzio di Pelešjan, 2011), Lost and Beautiful (Bella e perduta, 2015), For Lucio (Per Lucio, 2021), and the collective Futura (2021, with Alice Rohrwacher and Francesco Munzi). Yet, Marcello’s work, frequently described as neither wholly documentary nor wholly fictional, with its distinctive mix of vérité, performativity, and lyricism, its diverse materials, multi-layered temporality, and hybrid registers, raises questions on the nature of non-fiction and its relationship to the historical world. In this dialogue, Laura Rascaroli and Pietro Marcello will touch on several topics, including crossing the line between documentary and fiction, the reuse of archival footage, the portrait film, the lyrical voice, film’s materiality, and the incorporation of marginal and non-human points of view in non-fiction cinema.