edited by Richard Lyford. Legacy Flaherty is considered a pioneer of documentary film. He was one of the first to combine documentary subjects with a fiction-film-like narrative and poetic treatment. A self-proclaimed explorer, Flaherty was inducted into the Royal Geographic Society of England for his (re)discovery of the main island of the Belcher group in Hudson Bay in 1914. Flaherty Island, one of the Belcher Islands in Hudson Bay, is named in his honor. The Flaherty Seminar is an annual international forum for independent filmmakers and film-lovers, held in rural upstate New York at Colgate University in mid June. The festival was founded in Flaherty's honor by his widow in 1955. Flaherty's contribution to the advent of the documentary is scrutinized in the 2010 British Universities Film & Video Council award-winning and FOCAL International award-nominated documentary A Boatload of Wild Irishmen, written by Professor Brian Winston of University of Lincoln, UK, and directed by Mac Dara Ó Curraidhín. The film explores the nature of "controlled actuality" and sheds new light on thinking about Flaherty. The argument is made that the impact of Flaherty's films on the indigenous peoples portrayed changes over time, as the films become valuable records for subsequent generations of now-lost ways of life. The film's title derives from Flaherty's statement that he had been accused, in the staged climactic sequence of Man of Aran, of "trying to drown a boatload of wild Irishmen". In 1994, Flaherty was portrayed by Charles Dance in the Canadian drama film Kabloonak, a dramatization of the making of Nanook of the North from an Inuit perspective. The wife of Robert Joseph Flaherty's grandson, Louise Flaherty, is the co-founder of Canada's first independent Inuk publishing house, Inhabit Media. She is also an author, educator and politician. Awards BAFTA presents the Robert J. Flaherty Award for best one-off documentary. Academy Award Oscar - Best Documentary Feature 1950 - The Titan: Story of Michelangelo 1913, Fellow, Royal Geographical Society Filmography Films Nanook of the North (1922) "The Pottery Maker" (1925) Moana (1926) "Twenty-Four-Dollar Island" (1927) Man of Aran (1934) "Oidhche Sheanchais (A Night of Storytelling)" (1935) Elephant Boy (1937; with Zoltan Korda) The Land (1942; made for the U.S. Department of Agriculture) Louisiana Story (1948) Other work White Shadows in the South Seas (1928; uncredited footage) Acoma the Sky City (1929; unfinished film) Tabu (1931; screenplay with F. W. Murnau) "Industrial Britain" (1933; co-producer with