First Contact (1983 film)
"First Contact" is the first documentary in what later became known as "The Highland Trilogy". The other two films are "Joe Leahy's Neighbours" (1989) and "Black Harvest" (1992). These three films, between them, have won some thirty major awards, included each film winning both the Grand Prix at the Festival Cinéma du Réel in Paris and AFI Award for Best Documentary.
Mockumentary
Early work, including Luis Buñuel's 1933 "Land Without Bread", Orson Welles's 1938 radio broadcast of "The War of the Worlds", various April Fools' Day news reports, and "vérité"-style film and television during the 1960s and 1970s, served as precursor to the genre. Early examples of mock-documentaries include "The Connection" (1961), "A Hard Day's Night", 1964, (written by Alun Owen, purporting to describe several days in the lives of The Beatles, that would be the first feature-length mockumentary), "David Holzman's Diary", 1967, "Pat Paulsen for President", 1968, "Take the Money and Run", 1969, "The Clowns", 1970, by Federico Fellini (a peculiar hybrid of documentary and fiction, a docufiction), and "All You Need Is Cash", 1978. Albert Brooks was also an early popularizer of the mockumentary style with his film "Real Life", 1979, a spoof of a PBS documentary.