A small and emaciated man nicknamed Fungi dangles his legs over a wall in front of a council house in Birmingham, England. While Fungi swigs from a can of lager and squints into the camera, the narrator informs us that ‘finding a career, may not be Fungi’s main priority.’Benefits Street was a UK documentary, which aired on Channel 4 in 2014. As a fly-on-the-wall documentary (in the style of an unnoticed observer) it sought to provide an insight into the welfare system and life on benefits on a particular street in Birmingham.Documentaries present facts, they observe the material world, they ‘document’ reality. In the 1990s, the American film critic Bill Nichols first applied film theory and analysis to documentaries. He wrote that ‘the status of documentary film as evidence from the world legitimates its usage as a source of knowledge.’1 The proximity of documentary filmmaking to real events, their distance from fiction, means that it is possible to view them as uncorrupted by human subjectivity and bias. We often turn to documentaries to learn something, to have evidence presented to us — not to suspend disbelief and engage in the construction of narratives, as in fiction.However, in the editing room where documentaries are shaped, there is always a negotiation between representation and reality. This is because the editing room is a human space, where human choices are made to construct narratives and decide which images are presented and which are withheld. When reality is sequenced, cut and edited, some of its benign claims to representation are compromised.In Benefits Street, the image of Fungi drinking lager in the daytime is presumably the evidence for the narrator’s claim that he is uninterested in finding work. This behaviour is presented as the important framework in which to analyse his state of unemployment. Presented in this context, it appears that Fungi is reckless, irresponsible and unconcerned with finding work. Later, while the focus had moved to other characters, we see Fungi attending job centres and applying for work, but they are only ever small glimpses on the periphery of someone else's story. These facts are not brought to bear in the consideration of his willingness to find work. The narration and placement of the images of Fungi drinking is a creative and withholding act, which reveals the documentary's subjectivity.We are also informed later that Fungi is illiterate and relies on his neighbour to decipher documents. The scene is immediately followed by an exaggerated close-up of Fungi’s face as he lists every drug he has consumed throughout his life, presenting his historical drug use as the context for his illiteracy. Earlier we learned that Fungi was sexually abused as a child and lived under social care. A history of child abuse significantly increases the chances of dropping out of school and remaining illiterate, as was the case with Fungi2. In addition, the chance of gaining employment after leaving school early in Birmingham at the time was only 39%. The discussion around Fungi’s illiteracy is narrow and overlooks how abuse and trauma are associated with less access to employment.Around the time Benefits Street was filmed, a Birmingham City Council report stated that the main barriers to employment were a skills shortage3 — with Birmingham having the highest share of people without qualifications in the UK — a lack of funding, and a shortage of jobs that suited the local skills market.4 Benefits Street presents images of mess, people who drink, and children who swear, but with little acknowledgement of the underlying structural barriers to unemployment.While documentaries are necessarily selective, in the case of Benefits Street that selectivity is used to distort reality altogether.