Direct cinema is a documentary genre that originated between 1958 and 1962 in North America, principally in the Canadian province of Quebec and the United States, and developed by Jean Rouch in France. It is defined as a cinematic practice employing lightweight filming equipment, hand-held cameras and live, synchronous sound that was available to create due to the new ground-breaking technologies that were being developed in the early 1960s. This offered early independent filmmakers the possibility to do away with the large crews, studio sets, tripod-mounted equipment and special lights in the making of a film, expensive aspects that severely limited these low-budget early documentarians. Similar in many respects to the cinéma vérité genre, it was characterized initially by filmmakers' desire to directly capture reality and represent it truthfully, and to question the relationship of reality with cinema.