In the 1903 Harvard Lectures, Peirce formulates a question that he concedes is too hard to answer with the knowledge available at the time: “How do (symbols or words) produce their effect?” (EP2, p. 184). It is not a rhetorical question, but a full program for future research — one in which semioticians are still engaged a century later. Peirce introduces the notion of mediation to account for an effect that does not consist in symbols reacting directly upon matter. It is a non–dyadic rule which operates upon concrete things. “Representation”, “symbol”, “mediation” are synonyms for the “general principle that is operative in the real world” (CP 5.105), which at its most abstract Peirce calls “Thirdness”, a “less colored” term than representation. To explain this mysterious influence about whose existence Peirce is certain, this text analyzes the effects of the mediation of reality observed in Jogo de Cena (Coutinho 2007), a Brazilian experimental documentary that is an inquiry into narrative mediation. The film’s conceit is to invite ordinary women with a story to tell, but also to ask unknown and famous actresses to perform their narrative, in the same setting afterwards. The stories of these modern–day “Scheherezades” were edited to bring out the endless possibilities of those narratives as general representations. The design involves a double mediation: the spontaneous oral narratives of personal experience and the scripted performances of stage artists based on the former. The resulting growth of symbols (CP 2.302) through the evolving representations tests the limits of mediation and explores the ways in which it governs factuality. This aesthetic film exploration consists in freewheeling qualities of expression, hard facts of the past, and the governing principle that molds and connects both intelligibly. The outcome is an enthralling spectacle of the mediation of reality.