This paper was written as a response to the six main articles that appear in the special issue "Education in Motion: Producing Methodologies for Researching Documentary Film on Education." The afterword first tries to locate the special issue in a wider debate on the reassessment of the relationship between film, children and education. The article then considers how the usage of film as a research resource by historians of education might open up issues sometimes overlooked in mainstream film studies, particularly those spaces "beyond" the text: the social-cultural contexts in which production, distribution, exhibition and reception of documentary films are located. (Contains 21 footnotes.)