Directed and written by newcomer Morgan Knibbe, Those Who Feel the Fire Burning is an unusual and powerful documentary about the lives of immigrants stuck in Europe.

Those Who Feel the Fire Burning opens strongly with a man drowning at sea, having fallen from a boat taking him into a port. This drowning is shown from his perspective, with the darkness slowly filling the screen as he sinks down into the ocean. The ghost of this man then serves as our narrator and guide through the streets of Europe’s coastal towns and ports.

Whilst the narrator wonders philosophically about paradise and the failed hopes and dreams of himself and the others who managed to make it to Europe, the camera glides over and through towns and cities on Europe’s coast, focusing on several immigrants struggling to stay alive. We follow one man filling a pram with iron desperate for money. We also follow a Senegalese man living in an old disused house in dreadful condition, telling his wife on the phone about all the shoes and lipstick he can afford to buy and bring home to her. In particularly distressing scenes we also encounter a woman using an old phone charger tied around her arm to help her inject heroin, along with several immigrants mourning the loss of family members and friends who died at sea trying to get into the port.

Knibbe’s voyeuristic approach compounds the sense of unease, grief and isolation of the immigrants. The camera can get uncomfortably close to its subjects, so we can see the pain in their eyes whilst a relentless haunting soundtrack plays in the background. Knibbe conveys Europe as an unwelcoming world for immigrants as the camera lingers over dark streets filled with tension and police. The world these immigrants have entered is alien, isolating and disorienting. Those Who Feel the Fire Burning is not an easy watch. There is no sense of detachment and distance that would have come from a film with facts and statistics. Knibbe does not give the film any political context. This is not a film inclined to provoke a detailed discussion of the complex geo-political circumstances behind immigration. Instead, Knibbe gives a visceral and emotional portrayal of life as an immigrant. He conveys immigrants as trapped in a nightmarish purgatory, unable to move further on through Europe for a more prosperous life, yet also unable to return home to their families. When the narrator ponders his life as a ghost, of “existing and not existing,” the comparison with immigrants feeling a lack of identity is obvious, and serves to emphasize this point further.

Yet Knibbe is not always subtle, and Those Who Feel the Fire Burning does possess a fault—the film’s narration, which can occasionally be a little simplistic. In one scene the narrator asks “Are you an angel?” as the camera looks upon a little girl, obviously hammering home the heaven and purgatory theme. Knibbe has created such a powerful atmosphere with the cinematography and score alone that Those Who Feel the Fire Burning arguably does not need the voice-over and ghost character in order to elicit an emotional response. This scene feels manufactured, and is clumsy given the rest of the film’s subtlety. Thankfully, these missteps from Knibbe are infrequent. Those Who Feel the Fire Burning is a provocative, hypnotic film that draws you into a frightening world of uncertainty and hopelessness. It is a unique, intelligent film from Knibbe that deserves all the praise it can get.

Originally published on April 24, 2015, as part of our Hot Docs 2015 coverage.

In 2013, I saw the very engaging documentary Plimpton!, based on the legendary literary journalist George Plimpton, who put himself right in the middle of his stories, like the time he joined an NFL team and told the story in a way no outsider could. But director Ryan Mullins’ documentary on Ghanese journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas takes this sort of immersive journalism up a few notches on the stakes ladder. Anas works directly with police in placing himself undercover, where he infiltrates prostituion rings, illegal abortion clinics, and religious cults all for the sake of getting the information out to the people and spurring on social change. His methodologies are controversial—not many journalists place themselves in dangerous situations each time they write—but no one can argue with the power of his stories. He’s like a real-life Clark Kent, except we actually occasionally get to see him write a story.

The filmmakers were clearly going for this larger-than-life superhero angle when focusing their lens on Anas, who takes on a series of “missions” through a mixture of formal recording during the planning stages and hidden cameras while undercover. This persona is built up with street interviews (“He can vanish at any time! He can fly!”) and a dramatic montage at the film’s onset, where he gets a prestigious nod of approval from TED Talks, where he’s shown giving a speech, and President Barack Obama, who mentions him in a speech of his own.

But the film isn’t quite as exciting as the hype.

None of the missions feel terribly dangerous. And, no, I’m not criticizing a lack of violence, but the film’s tone, which at times doesn’t seem in line with the gravity of the situation. The opening scene, where Anas and detectives capture a man who’s raped more than 12 children, seems bizarrely light. Anas is first shown in a van on a cellphone reveling with someone, “I’m got him. Yeeeeessss. Exciting!” To be followed by actually taunting the captured man in the van. “The kids used to say, ‘One day you’ll be arrested,’” he says, smugly. “This is the Day.” It really kind of rubbed me the wrong way. If you’re going for a superhero comparison, you need to balance it out with a little humility: Batman never sat in the back of the Batmobile talking about how cool the catch was. When we follow this scene with a visit to a school where he’s retelling his capers like a teen remembering his glory days on the high school football team, I almost gave up on this film for good.

Don’t get me wrong; I blame the somewhat cocky tone entirely on the film’s editing. Anas’ award-winning journalism is impressive. The missions, which we get to see from start to end, seem well-planned and carefully executed. And, most importantly, Anas is dealing with some very serious human-rights violations, saving lives and putting away very despicable men. He deserves to be the subject of a documentary. I think the well-meaning steps to build up the hype of “Anas, the unstoppable” just lost their footing a little. But, somehow, even with the superhero comparisons, we’re confronted with some surprisingly slow passages. The same mission planning I just commended actually makes up the bulk of the documentary, and when interwoven with additional interviews, sometimes it’s easy to forget what mission we’re planning for next. To compound the issue, the conversations aren’t always easy to follow due to the thick accents of interviewees.

But that’s nitpicking. The true problem here is that no one has a face. A visit to Anas’ hometown doesn’t reveal more about the mystery man other than the fact that he used to sell chameleons as a kid—an appropriate metaphor for a man who is constantly adapting to new situations. But it’s hardly revelatory. Every human being has motivations and weaknesses. We never penetrate the surface of Anas, the man. We also don’t get to know any of the criminals beyond their charges on paper. The undercover footage we watch alongside Anas doesn’t capture the actual ringleaders often, let alone their crimes. Instead, we get a lot of shaky footage of large groups of people and the outdoors, with the occasional brief one-on-one interview. As a result, each arrest feels a bit rushed: crime and capture, without those moments to feel invested in between.

We do get to spend more time on the last mission, a religious cult guilty of a slew of sex crime violations, and the payoff here works for the very reason I’m describing: We finally get a human face when filmmakers track down a 13-year-old girl and her mother. When she tells her story of being sexually assaulted by men who claimed she was possessed, her mother’s face turns from grief to shame when the girl says her mother also believed she was possessed.

This girl’s five-minute appearance steals the show. We needed a dozen more of these moments. These are the people Anas’ stories are truly aimed at illuminating. The film focuses too much on the James Bond elements. Sure it’s hard, even impossible, to get the stories from these people living in isolated conditions and who have been brainwashed and traumatized. But actually relaying those stories is probably why Anas’s stories are engaging—and why this documentary ultimately falls short.

Originally published as part of our Hot Docs 2015 coverage.

It only takes a few minutes before (T)ERROR grabs viewers, pulling them right into its riveting story as it unfolds in real-time. What gives (T)ERROR its sense of immediacy and high level of tension is that directors Lyric R. Cabral and David Felix Sutcliffe have done something no other filmmakers have done before: they somehow managed to get involved in an FBI counter terrorism operation, following an informant as he goes on a mission for the US government.

The informant is Saeed “Shariff” Torres, a 63-year-old man working as a cook in a school cafeteria. Despite his long working relationship with the FBI, one that gave him 6-figure paychecks, money is hard to come by, and when the government offers him another job he accepts, hoping it will be his last. With Cabral and Sutcliffe in tow, Shariff parts from his young son, heading off to Pittsburgh. A title card informs that, although Cabral and Sutcliffe intend to film Shariff’s investigation, his FBI superiors have no idea of their involvement.

The FBI orders Shariff to investigate Khalifah Al-Akili, a white man who converted to Islam. Shariff’s mission: Find out if Khalifah intends to leave the country to join a terrorist training camp. At this point, with Shariff’s objective laid out, (T)ERROR doesn’t have many places to go. Shariff winds up spending most of his time at his safe house, smoking marijuana to take the edge off while waiting for the right opportunity to get acquainted with Khalifah.

With the present investigation stagnant, Cabral and Sutcliffe venture into Shariff’s past. They learn about his work with the Black Panthers, how he came to work for the FBI, and one of the biggest cases he worked on as an informant. Cabral and Sutcliffe try their best to paint a portrait of Shariff, but their attempts wind up dragging the film down, largely because of their subject’s resistance. Shariff proves to be a tricky subject, as he’s constantly reluctant to speak on camera or answer any questions. He’s simply too unsympathetic and standoffish to invest in, making Cabral and Sutcliffe’s attempts to paint him as a tragic figure periodically effective.

But just when (T)ERROR looks like it’s about to fall into a dull portrait of Shariff, Cabral and Sutcliffe introduce a new element that suddenly kicks things into high gear again (Warning: spoilers from here on out). Without telling Shariff, the two directors set up an interview with Khalifah, who has no idea that the filmmakers interviewing him are simultaneously following the man investigating him. Once Khalifah gets involved with the proceedings, (T)ERROR dives head-first into murky waters, but with a direct purpose. By getting entangled in the case, Cabral and Sutcliffe expose a problem that’s been allowed to go on for too long because of its secrecy.

As Cabral and Sutcliffe begin crosscutting between Shariff and Khalifah, a horrifying truth begins to emerge; Khalifah doesn’t turn out to be a threat, but the FBI continues putting pressure on Shariff to provide “results,” whatever they may be. And when the film uses this story to comment on how this sort of injustice is rampant around the country, it paints a chilling picture. By the end, (T)ERROR turns into a portrait of two men trapped and exploited on both ends of the same system, with Cabral and Sutcliffe expertly extrapolating their subject matter to a broader, more systematic level. If last year’s Citizenfour showed that the government can get whatever they want, (T)ERROR presents a message that might be even more unnerving: the government will always get what it wants, even if it has to make it up.

Originally published as part of our 2015 Hot Docs coverage.

There must be something going on in North Dakota. Jesse Moss’ profile of a small ND town in The Overnighters was one of 2014’s best documentaries, and now another gripping, dramatic documentary has made its way out of North Dakota. Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker’s Welcome to Leith finds an incredibly tense situation playing out in a small ghost town, and both directors somehow manage to capture the whole thing while having complete access to all involved parties. It won’t be surprising if this winds up being one of the year’s most thrilling films.

Leith is the kind of small town that looks like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road come to life. It’s small, located in the middle of nowhere, and has a population of 24. It’s so small that town mayor Ryan Schock doubles as Leith’s school bus driver. Nichols and Walker spend their time introducing several of Leith’s residents before introducing Craig Cobb, a new arrival in town. Cobb swoops into Leith, snapping up a dozen plots of land. Schock and the rest of Leith don’t get too concerned about a stranger suddenly buying up chunks of their city, thinking it might be an investor trying to profit off of the state’s recent oil boom.

Except, as it turns out, Cobb is actually one of America’s most dangerous white supremacists, a vicious hatemonger who terrorizes anyone who tries to stop him. Cobb wants Leith to become a safe haven for white supremacists, and soon enough Cobb’s allies begin moving into his plots of land, ready to start a new life in an all-white utopia. By the time Schock finds out what’s happening, it’s too late. News of Cobb’s takeover spreads like wildfire, and in the film’s most heart-racing scene, Cobb blatantly announces his master plan with Leith at a tense town meeting: he’s going to let his friends move in and vote out everyone in office at the next election, giving him complete control over the city. It’s a moment that feels like it’s from a ridiculous Hollywood thriller, with Cobb fully inhabiting the role of a maniacal villain.

And just like that, the people of Leith suddenly get thrust into a nasty war for the sanctity of their town. Nichols and Walker prefer to step back when they profile the intense back-and-forths between Cobb’s people and Leith’s, letting the drama play out on its own. Their primary job appears to be providing context, with talking heads coming in to explain Cobb’s background, along with going into detail about hate groups across America. The film points out how, after 9/11, people’s eyes turned away from their own country and out into the world for new threats. Since people like Cobb are rarely heard about in the news, it might be hard to think of him as a serious danger, but Nichols and Walker provide several recent, chilling examples of hate crimes to show how people like Cobb have the potential for truly heinous behaviour.

Welcome to Leith doesn’t really delve too deep into some of the topics it brings up, but its transformation of Leith’s storyline into a tense, efficient narrative provides plenty of engrossing material. It would have been nice if Welcome to Leith offered a little more. There’s a scene where a group of people burn down a dilapidated house on one of Cobb’s properties out of anger, and for a brief moment the film flirts with condemning both sides of the story. It’s only a fleeting moment, but it hints that there may be more to Leith than just a damn good story.

A version of this review originally ran as part of our Hot Docs 2015 coverage. 

In 2011, I didn’t believe in the power of Twitter. Like many dissenters, I didn’t understand why we needed multiple platforms to complain to our friends about how awful Mondays are. My perspective changed during the Arab Spring, when I started following an NPR journalist named Andy Carvin. A tool can be used in many ways, and in March 2011, Carvin and his Twitter following debunked news reports about Israeli weapons being found in Libya—simply by sharing images and research over Twitter. It’s all compiled in this fascinated Storify story. With absolutely no exaggeration, I can say my mind was totally blown.

Given his presence on social media and in Western reporting on the Arab Spring, it’s no surprise that Carvin makes an appearance in director Sophie Deraspe’s new documentary, A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile, a thrilling retelling of the online maelstrom that occurred when a lesbian Arab blogger named Amina went missing in June 2011. While the confusing presence of technology in our lives is a major topic of the film—as well as the growing unrest in Damascus following the Arab Spring—the heart of this documentary is a love story: the bewitching tale of a Syrian woman who meets a French-Canadian named Sandra online, a relationship which emboldens both women to stand up for their beliefs. This has greater inherent stakes for Amina as she attends protests in Damascus (where a man is shot and killed just beside her).

And, indeed, the hidden fear of both women is realized when, 30 minutes into the movie, Sandra gets an email saying Amina’s been kidnapped. The outcry on social media is impassioned and hysterical. It only gets worse when Andy Carvin types four simple words:

“Has anyone met Amina?”

The insinuation would quickly become “because I’m starting to think she’s not real.” Oh, what kind of rabbit hole have you opened, Mr. Carvin? Is Twitter a tool to catch journalists when they slip up, or can it be a dangerous place where novice investigators derail a case—one with life and death consequences?

The bulk of the film follows from that question, and the men and women entangled in the Amina case extend far and wide: Amina’s girlfriend, her online friends (which, while platonic, seem to hold just as passionate of a bond), reporters, crisis interventionists, Syrian gay-rights activists, and more. The voices are varied and span several continents, but everyone shares one common goal: looking for a girl, who, if Syrian tradition stands true, is probably suffering the immediate threat of torture and even death. But a fringe that believes Amina is a con artist undermines the entire investigation.

Where there is never conflict is in the recreated exchanges between Sandra and Amina based on instant messenger transcripts. Sandra repeats the refrain, “be careful, love.” Of course, when there is not a ton of archival footage to rely on, documentaries sometimes opt to create their own imagery—and the filmmakers do here, often portraying a young Arab woman in her room or walking the streets. The way the filmmakers recreate scenes, sometimes sensual, sometimes pensive and reflective, don’t seem just like filler in this film. They’re essential to its tone—instant messages just can’t fully show what being in a relationship feels like. After all, at the heart of this story is a Canadian woman deeply invested in a woman she hasn’t heard from in weeks, so the blurring of fact and fiction does wonders to maintain a tone of conflicting emotions—both lust and confusion. Their romance is intense and passionate, feeling more like a pair of university students falling in love for the first time rather than two 30-somethings behind computer monitors. The depictions of Amina stay abstract and short, like tiny strings of poetry amidst the dark backdrop of a region in war. By the time Amina is kidnapped, Sandra’s terror matches the viewer’s terror.

Documentaries can’t always nail the narrative arc, but A Gay Girl in Damascus certainly does. It’s impossible to not feel invested in Amina’s plight—and by extension the twisted emotions of her friends and lover. By piling on impassioned interview after impassioned interview with everyone who knew Amina, the love story ultimately wins. If there is any criticism to be delivered here, it’s that the actual coverage of the conflict in Syria, and the effects of many journalists choosing to cover Amina versus other conflicts, is only done in a cursory way. One of the conflicts Sandra and her supporters faced was the growing criticism that resources used on Amina could have been used on more important/more universal stories. Perhaps my bias of seeing just how revolutionary some of the informal Twitter reporting was leads me to believe that this film could have been stronger if we weren’t just told, offhand, about one or two stories that were neglected that week, but if we were also shown some of the incredible ways journalism was done right. Harping on the idea that more stories could have been covered, without getting specific, comes off as a little didactic, and that could have totally been avoided. Real people, both journalists and protesters, did some amazing things in 2011 with smartphones and social media accounts.

But I get it. In a film about one topic, you have to pick your battles. And in delivering a modern-day love story-turned-mystery with more twists than your average blockbuster, A Gay Girl in Damascus: The Amina Profile delivers. And for its part, it offers some necessary cautionary tales for the digital age.

A version of this review was first published as part of our 2015 Hot Docs Film Festival coverage.

With only two features and one short, Rodney Ascher has established himself as a documentarian focused on the communal aspect of horror. His first documentary, the short film The S from Hell, played testimonies by people who were terrified by the 1964 Screen Gems logo at the end of various TV shows. He followed that up with his feature debut Room 237, about people with wild conspiracy theories about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining. With both of these films, Ascher explored how a piece of media could conjure up such strange and specific reactions. What is it about The Shining that makes people speculate so wildly about hidden meaning? Why did a TV logo strike fear into the hearts of so many children? With The Nightmare, Ascher sets his sights on a similar idea, but this time he’s effectively transitioned from niche topics to something far more universal.

The Nightmare isn’t just about scary dreams. Ascher delves into the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, where people find their bodies frozen while some sort of demonic entity (or entities) terrorize them. Each person has their own unique experience getting scared senseless. Sometimes a person might only feel an evil presence around them. Other times shadow people or demonic creatures stand directly over them, looking like they’re moments away from attacking. Ascher’s subjects have a large supply of anecdotes about the times they’ve suffered from sleep paralysis, with some of them so strange it’s hard not to get creeped out.

Ascher doesn’t feel the need to delve into more than what the eight people he profiles tell him. It’s easy to want to hear from a medical professional or a neurologist to learn about what might cause such a horrifying event. Ascher doesn’t really see the need for it. Anyone who’s experienced sleep paralysis knows how vivid they are. Almost all of the interview subjects believe with absolute certainty that what they felt and saw was real, and it’s hard to argue against them. Much like The S from Hell and Room 237, Ascher is more interested in relating these subjective experiences, using filmmaking techniques to place viewers in the same mindset as his subjects.

This is where Ascher takes a big formal departure from his previous works. In Room 237, Ascher only played audio of his interviews over footage of The Shining, and by obsessively poring over sequences frame by frame it made it easy to understand where some of the out there theories were coming from. The Nightmare actually shows the faces of who Ascher interviews, usually shooting them at nighttime in their own bedroom. This is the first half of the film, with the other half dedicated to highly stylistic re-enactments of the different nightmares. The on-camera interviews feel necessary because they give these nightmares an authenticity that makes them all the more unsettling. Hearing about them is one thing; actually seeing the conviction and emotions from everyone as they speak makes it easy to understand why they’re so convinced that what happened to them wasn’t a delusion.

The Nightmare’s second half, where Ascher attempts to remake these stories into something cinematic, is where the film’s problems lie. Cinematographer Bridger Nielson makes these sequences look terrific, along with the talking head interviews, but they’re too cheesy to actually generate something as terrifying as what’s being told. Hearing someone talk about being paralyzed in their bed while large, black orbs start floating towards them sounds creepy, especially with the precise descriptions; seeing an actor cower as two poorly rendered CGI blobs float above them winds up being more of a distraction than a means of accentuating the horror. Dreams come from the imagination, and it might have been better to leave things there than try to represent them on-screen. At the end of the day, nothing will be as scary as what we conjure up in our own minds.

While these re-enactments don’t generate as much fear as simply seeing and hearing the real people tell their story as they experienced it, Ascher does bring up a fascinating idea through these sleek representations. All of them are shot through highly conventional and familiar horror techniques: canted angles, shadows, jump scares, and an ominous score. A scene early on has some people afflicted with sleep paralysis bringing up films like Insidious to show how elements come directly from common imagery associated with sleep paralysis and nightmares (one of the film’s lighter moments comes when one person praises Insidious for how it portrayed nightmares, but still found it to be a disappointment when compared to the real thing). These scenes make it easy to ponder just how much horror films and nightmares feed off each other, how one inspires the other in a sort of strange cyclical pattern.

But Ascher isn’t all about making a thought-provoking documentary on what scares us. The Nightmare obviously wants to scare people, and even though Ascher can be hit or miss on the recreations, he does have a good share of unnerving moments courtesy of his subjects (I’ve avoided explaining too much about them here since it’s no fun to ruin the surprise). At one point someone mentions how episodes began to develop from simply explaining sleep paralysis to a friend. “Kind of like an STD, a sleep transmitted disease,” he says, and that’s where The Nightmare offers something far more wickedly fun than The S from Hell or Room 237. In those films it was easy to watch these groups of people with a bemused detachment. In The Nightmare Ascher suggests that, by watching this film and becoming aware of its subject matter, you might have unwittingly let this phenomenon into your own life. Just try having a good night’s sleep with that idea in your head.

Originally published on April 27, 2015 as part of our Hot Docs coverage.

Director Agnieszka Zwiefka found the untold story of untold stories: among an illegal Roma camp in Wroclaw, Poland, 10-year-old Denisa Gabor is an outcast even among her gypsy family and friends. The young girl fell deaf, by the family’s estimation around age two, and without financial or medical support she simply never learned to speak. She gets by with grunts and hand gestures. The only time she seems to really communicate in the way she wants to is when she discovers a Bollywood tape in a nearby dump and plays it on the old TV in her family’s makeshift home. She mimics the moves, and for once, communication doesn’t seem like a barrier.

Denisa, as one can tell from the title, is the film’s heart and soul, but on the periphery of Zwiefka’s narrative are tensions of social class—both the prejudices of being an outsider and the severe limitations of poverty. The city is in the midst of deciding whether to expel the entire population—one newscast asks, “What should we do with people without education, even papers?”

In the film’s first third, the clash of cultures is really fascinating, if not alarming. The filmmakers don’t explain how Denisa can suddenly afford to get fitted for a hearing aid, but she does, and the doctor’s pointed questions double in showing us the living biases this population faces and the catch-22 of their situation (they can’t get a job without an address; they can’t get health care without a job). Perhaps the most shocking moments, especially in a film starring a 10-year-old girl, is the vulgar language hurled, not just at the adults, from seemingly every direction—elderly on the streets, non-Roma children at the parks, and even from within their own community. As a Western viewer, it’s a bit of an awakening to realize that discrimination against Roma communities is hardly a thing of history and folklore.

Where I get lost a bit is with the film’s Bollywood aspects. Instead of Denisa returning to that initial Bollywood movie or making up her own modest routines like a young kid might, we get several full-scale choreographed numbers: dancing atop rooftops with the kids from her camp, floating through the streets as the whole town comes together like a grand finale of A Chorus Line, and a complex number on a basketball court where she takes center stage like a prima ballerina. My criticism isn’t about the musical aspect itself; the numbers are lovely and colorful (quite literally—she dances in Roma-inspired veils of teal and peach), but I think the Bollywood aspect poses an important question about the film’s narrative. Whether or not you’re fine with their inclusion will be based on how liberal your view of creative nonfiction is, because clearly someone has intervened to choreograph and stage these sequences. Seeing the same girl who seconds ago got shooed away by cops while begging for money come to life is nothing short of inspiring. I’m just wondering if it’s helpful. It’s not making up facts, but it’s making up emotions.

Each of these scenes gets placed very carefully after a particularly difficult real-time conflict: her parents arguing with neighboring families, the police showing up, the nightly news talking about the impending court case regarding the settlement. While the adults look dismal, even angry, the camera shifts to Denisa, going silent except a low buzz—indicating that, perhaps mercifully, Denisa can’t hear any of this. Then, like drifting into a dream, we shift into these imaginative dance sequences, where the world’s problems are a million miles away. As a pure storytelling technique the juxtaposition is lovely. They remind me of a powerful scene in the French film Girlhood where a working class band of friends forget about abusive family members and limited future prospects long enough to belt out to Rihanna’s “Diamonds”—the implication being that despite everything that’s happened to them, their true spirits still live inside them. But Girlhood is fiction, and I’m conflicted on the use of this same technique in a documentary.

As a human being, I can’t help feeling thankful someone gave Denisa a moment to be special, but then, of course, there’s this nagging sense that during these interludes, the film stops being a documentary. They’re an intervention, a fiction, and as such it’s hard to know what is really going on in her mind during these tough times. Having no idea what the film’s core subject is thinking feels like a misstep. At one pivotal moment near the end, we see her hearing aid on the ground, indicating that she chose to stop hearing. The film says choosing not to hear was her choice, but we’re given no exposition in the film itself to know that this was the case. There was no way to know it wasn’t simply from accident—or even neglect. So Denisa remains a mystery, albeit one for whom it’s impossible not to root for.

The dance scenes do break up the melodrama with a bit of hope and energy, though; some of the Roma mystical charm—a moonlit dance in front of a fire—is simply enchanting. But it’s hard to know if the hope the dance elements give is real. Oddly, this leaves me asking more humanitarian questions than most films that tell us what to think provoke. Is ignorance really bliss? How will she live as an adult without speech? Surely, a system that allows a girl to go untreated for a decade is broken? This film focuses its camera only on Denisa and doesn’t pose these bigger questions, but perhaps viewers will take the baton and ask them for her.

What an odd piece of work is Double Happiness! It’s a documentary about a small enclave in China that’s artificially designed and planned to replicate a small village-town in Austria called Hallstatt. We’re talking down to the shapes of the windows and the curves of the gables. It’s such a surreal stranger than fiction story, and that strangeness even carries over to the stylistic and abstract way Ella Raidel chooses to present it. Eschewing the use of traditional talking heads, the handful of interviewees are mostly there to share in the perplexity of the project, or justify its existence as the art of imitation. What makes Double Happiness so peculiar, though, is how it rebounds and evolves in its perspectives. Urban planners talking about how impressed they are with Hallstatt as a creation of something so beautiful on such a small scale eventually evolves into a philosophical quandary on the concept as applied to huge urban cities, and the consequences that would have on national identity and civilization. These things are merely mentioned, however, and left for the viewers to think about and explore.

As the documentary rolls on it becomes increasingly more bizarre, with Chinese ladies singing lullabies about the moon and monologues dedicated to explaining the duality of a traditional deity, and its relationship to modern culture. What saves the somewhat disheveled structure and random shifts in tone is how absolutely stunning the images are, often made more appealing by shallow depth of field. Whether the camera is pointing at the real picturesque Hallstatt, its replica in China, or a montage of splendorous nighttime shots in the concrete jungle of Shenzhen, with its frightfully Blade Runner-esque aesthetic, it’s impossible to look away. Even the mise-en-scène of the interior shots permeates with the hard work and creative thought put into them. Thanks to this wondrous cinematography work by Martin Putz and Raidel, and the overall refreshingly unique visual approach that doesn’t shy away from using silence to its advantage, Double Happiness overcomes its messy flow, and propensity for going on major tangents, and comes highly recommended.

After dealing with a multitude of uninteresting “musical discovery” documentaries, along comes Jessica Edwards’ Mavis!, a giant celebration of an amazing singer’s successful career. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with using a documentary to show off someone’s incredible talent, especially when it’s profiling someone like Mavis Staples. She was one of the more prominent members of The Staple Singers, a band started by her father Roebuck “Pops” Staples. Both Pops and Mavis, along with other Staples family members (the lineup would switch around frequently), started out as a gospel group before successfully transitioning into the mainstream with hits like “I’ll Take You There.” Edwards delves into the history of Mavis’ life and career, starting with her 40+ years as part of the Staple Singers before going solo after the death of her father.

Edwards doesn’t seem too interested in talking about any dramas or conflicts in Mavis’ life, and the documentary’s relentlessly positive tone may disappoint viewers expecting any sort of juicy backstage stories. But the doc’s upbeat nature is entirely representative of Mavis herself. She’s an incredibly charismatic figure, and so down-to-earth that every time she speaks it’s obvious to see she knows how lucky she’s been in life. And Edwards offers plenty of great information about Mavis and her family, especially Pops Staples, who gets properly recognized as one of the more progressive and groundbreaking musicians of his time. The film is both an interesting history lesson about The Staple Singers, and a portrait of a truly likable subject. And once the unexpectedly moving finale rolls around, it’s hard not to see Mavis! as a great how-to on making a good heartwarming music documentary.

My interest in stand-up comedy began at a young age when a friend introduced me to records by George Carlin and Steve Martin. Since then, and over the course of my life, I’ve memorized comedy routines (from folks like Stephen Wright and Richard Lewis, plus all of Bill Cosby: Himself), recorded Johnny Carson and Dave Letterman nightly to see what up-and-coming comics they might spotlight, donated money to Comic Relief, and once saw Eddie Murphy perform Delirious from the sixth row of a small theater-in-the-round in the Philly suburbs. As life has gone on, I’ve heard thousands of jokes on TV and in person, as told by hundreds of stand-up comics, some of whom have gone on to greater things. Most haven’t gone on to greater things, though.

This focus on stand-up comedy’s history and the opportunity for superstardom, as told by three comics who have lived it, is what piqued my interest in 3 Still Standing. The doc, from co-directors Robert Campos and Donna LoCicero, makes its international premiere at Hot Docs 2015.

The film looks at the careers of three comedy lifers—Will Durst, Larry “Bubbles” Brown, and Johnny Steele—during and after the rise and fall of the once-white hot 1980s San Francisco comedy scene. Their stories are told mostly by them, but the film also includes soundbites about the trio and the times from several successful comics to come out of that scene, including Bobby Slayton, Paula Poundstone, Dana Carvey, and Robin Williams.

3 Still Standing is several things. It is first a love letter to the San Francisco comedy scene of the 1980s. The film works hard at this, not only by offering something of a history lesson, but also by strongly establishing how different the comedy of San Francisco stand-ups was when compared to comedy being done around the country. While at times granular, it’s still an interesting story, particularly as time marches closer to the present and the national landscape of comedy and its club scene changes for what the consensus believes to be for the worse.

It is also a mini-celebration of the late Robin Williams. His sound bites, and there are quite a few, are riveting, but they are also the hardest to consume because of his loss, and how recently they were recorded. Given the film’s focus on the history of the San Francisco comedy scene, Williams certainly deserves considerable mention; he is the most successful comic to come out of that scene. Still, knowing this film is one of his last is hard to bear.

And, of course, 3 Still Standing is a funny look at three funny men. There’s a reason why Durst, Brown, and Steele are still working today—they are very good at what they do, and that has translated to long and (overall) healthy careers. In addition to presenting highlights of those careers, the film also showcases how the trio’s approach to comedy has evolved over time and adapted to survive whatever the current landscape has been.

Still, the film fails to achieve the narrative it’s selling. Consider its pitch:

They were rising stars in San Francisco in the 1980s, working the comedy clubs alongside Robin Williams and Dana Carvey. They dreamed of being rich and famous … but life had other ideas.

This suggests life got in the way of success for these three. This suggests some sort of misfortune that prevented these three from achieving the greatness Williams and Carvey achieved. This likens the trio to athletes who were once on the verge of superstardom, but had their careers derailed by injury or family tragedy, leaving them to wonder, “What If?” None of this is the case, or if it is, the case is poorly made.

Yes, these three comics haven’t gotten that “big break” in 30 years. Yes, the film covers their individual flirtations with the next level. And yes, the film looks at how hard they are working today. But there is no sense that anything that happened to them in their careers directly correlates to missed chances or failure, nor does anything suggest that these three are as good as Williams or Carvey, thus worthy of that level of success. A lot of people graduate alongside greatness; that association doesn’t automatically make them great as well. The film’s pitch wants you to think it does. The film’s execution proves it doesn’t.

At its best, 3 Still Standing is a fine entry in the greater canon of the history of stand-up comedy. It is also good at getting laughs. But its efforts to garner sympathy for its subjects are unsuccessful and tone-deaf. These are three men who have not only survived working in a difficult industry, they have found success in doing so. Because their success isn’t as great as the success of others isn’t worthy of the sympathy being requested.

The media called him Curveball, but the man’s real name is Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi. If you haven’t heard either name, you might know him as the Iraqi defector who revealed to the U.S. that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, the catalyst for the U.S. invasion of Iraq. He’s now claiming he made it all up—that he said whatever U.N. inspectors wanted to hear because, in his mind, they shared a goal of overthrowing Saddam Hussein. As he tells his story in full for the first time, director Matthias Bittner sits across a table, not unlike those used in a police interrogation. Janabi’s eyes water up as he says “To be honest, no one knows the real Rafid.” And thus starts Bittner’s 90-minute conversation with the man who may have started a war.

It’s a big accusation, and War of Lies is a movie trying to make big statements. From Bittner’s first question: “What does the word truth mean to you?” spoken in a dark room with a dramatic hard light on Janabi’s face, it’s clear this movie wants to make grand statements about humanity and personal responsibility. This sort of documentary format—with exactly one interviewee carrying the narrative, largely in a single room—has been done before with some success. But, right away, that very leading opening question betrays some problems. Usually the interviewee, guilty or not, is given the benefit of the doubt, and I can’t really tell from the tone of the interview if that’s the case here. The marketing material for War of Lies posits the question: “Is Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi simply a proud Iraqi who helped rid the world of Saddam Hussein, or a brilliant con artist whose story about chemical weapons led the US to invade Iraq?” But the director, and thus the film, seem to have a very clear agenda: to get this guy to apologize.

The format (of essentially letting Janabi talk for an hour) seems a bit at odds with this agenda. Usually if a subject is allowed to give their perspective, they’re given a little leeway, even if the audience still must choose if they’ll extend the same compassion. But these questions are so pointed at times that it seems like the interviewer has completely ignored what was just said, to get the necessary sound byte.

Maybe it’s devil’s advocate. Maybe Bittner needs to be hard-hitting, so he doesn’t lose the audience that wants him to ask the hard questions. But the way he interrogates him, the repeated attempts to drag out emotional scenes (showing Janabi images and video footage of children suffering as a result of the war in Iraq), and the editorial choice to end the movie on a somewhat forced apology (after Janabi spends 90 minutes in no minced words saying that he doesn’t regret any action that got Hussein out of power) seems to indicate the goal is something akin to: “We want to know you feel bad.” It seems to ignore the narrative leads a film can often happily discover when they choose to listen to a subject instead of going in already knowing what they want to hear. In the process of getting this apology, I think the filmmakers miss some interesting follow-up questions. For instance, the insinuation of Janabi’s storyline, for me, seems to be that the U.S. would have declared war on Iraq either way, with or without his existence. When a major military power wants to go to war, they will dig up something to justify it, then pass that on to the media. Maybe that’s a dangerous and preposterous assertion—maybe it’s not—but if that’s the story he’s trying to tell, it seems absurd to put him in the chair and give the illusion that he’s giving his side of the story but to steer the end results somewhere else.

To be clear, it is ambiguous what Janabi’s role is. To his credit, he’s an eloquent individual who throughout the film, even under pressure of very pointed questions, doesn’t seem to change his story. But he has a bit of an Amanda Knox problem in that his nonverbal behavior often veers a little creepy. He laughs at seemingly inappropriate times. He smiles after relaying a story where he was apparently scared for his life while under the custody of the German secret service. But social oddness is hardly an indication of guilt.

But let’s assume Janabi is guilty for a second. The problem is this movie is not really about the war, it’s about one person’s perspective on how he got catapulted to the national limelight. So if we think he’s guilty, which seems to be the filmmakers’ stance, what are we left with? Ultimately, maybe the format of single interview in a room just didn’t work here. Maybe we needed more outside corroboration to know whether or not to feel invested in this man’s story. The documentary is a great format to use for the dissemination of information—it’s a little less effective if the information might not even be true. In the end, I’m not even sure what to do with this film, and that’s unfortunate, because it’s a subject that even 10 years on, begs so much for clarity.

Countless films have been made about aliens coming down to Earth, but now director Michael Madsen brings that concept into the realm of documentary with The Visit. Madsen asks what we as a species would do if an alien came down to our planet, and answers his own question in a rather unique way. He makes the viewer take the perspective of the visiting lifeform, and has his talking heads—various professionals across Europe who deal with the type of hypothetical situation Madsen proposes—talk to the camera directly as if they’re conversing with the alien itself. Think of The Visit as less of a straightforward documentary about a science fiction scenario, and more of a realistic simulation of how to logistically handle the presence of an unknown entity.

At least, that’s what Madsen wants The Visit to be. It’s definitely a fascinating concept, but what sounds good on paper doesn’t always translate well to the screen. Madsen’s choice to take the alien’s perspective falls flat on its face from frame one, a mistake the film never fully recovers from. The interview subjects provide a wide, interesting range of perspectives, but making these people treat the camera as an extraterrestrial only provides one clunky, awkward scene after another. Even worse is when Madsen gets two people together at the same time, like two PR experts from the UK, to discuss handling more operational aspects of the visit with each other. It’s exactly what you’d expect; non-actors awkwardly play acting.

It’s also inconsistent with what Madsen wants to achieve by taking the visitor’s POV. Sometimes the subjects talk directly to the camera. Other times they clearly respond to a question asked of them, and when multiple people talk with each other on camera it’s designed to be conversation between just those people. Madsen just doesn’t commit to the gimmick he lays out, and The Visit becomes largely frustrating since it has no idea of what the hell it wants to do. Also unnecessarily complicating matters is a fictitious storyline where one of the interviewees “enters” the being’s spacecraft, a strange part to add considering the rest of the documentary’s emphasis on realism.

There are some flashes of interesting elements peppered throughout The Visit. Specific facts, like the United Nations having an “Office for Outer Space Affairs,” or the French Space Agency having a theologian as an advisor, are compelling pieces of information. And the film’s use of extreme slow motion when filming large crowds in public turns out to be a simple, effective way to turn the normal into the abnormal, with the smooth, slow-moving images giving off a surreal vibe. In a film filled with sleek visuals and re-enactments, it’s the only time where Madsen comes close to evoking a feeling of observing humans from an outsider’s perspective.

But those moments come few and far between. As The Visit plods along, Madsen begins unveiling the themes he really wants to look at, and they’re the kind of half-baked ideas that easily elicit groans. Madsen realizes that, by having to explain things to an alien, humans would have to confront deep, philosophical questions about themselves. Madsen could use this to explore some interesting existential themes, but instead the film’s narrator blurts out lines like “Man would rather destroy himself than give up the illusion that he controls everything.” It’s an observation that, like the entirety of The Visit, is more insufferable than insightful.

Losing a parent is difficult. Losing that parent twice—once to estrangement and once to death—isn’t just difficulty doubled, it’s difficulty squared. This is the emotional math Andrea Schiavelli had to work through when his estranged father, Hollywood character actor Vincent Schiavelli (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest; Fast Times at Ridgemont High; Ghost), died in 2005. Ten years later, Andrea finds himself forced to revisit some old emotional haunts when he receives word that a bank in Italy found money the elder Schiavelli left in estate.

Making its world premiere at Hot Docs 2015 is director Marco Amenta’s Magic Island, the story that looks at the Schiavelli father/son dynamic as experienced by Andrea in the form of two trips. One trip is his physical travel from Brooklyn to Palermo, Sicily, where his father lived out his last days. The other trip is his emotional journey as he relives childhood memories and confronts the fractured relationship he avoided for well over a decade.

Magic Island is a great example of the mutual exclusivity that exists between story and storytelling in the documentary genre. As has been the case with so many docs before it, the story behind Magic Island is a good one, but its telling fails to do that story proper justice. It’s unfortunate, because it’s an interesting story with four key elements that offer countless storytelling approaches: celebrity, estrangement, death, and money.

(That last item that is the most interesting facet, because Andrea isn’t told over the phone how much money his father left him. This makes at least part of his trip motivated by the potential for a considerable windfall.)

Director Armenta opts against tapping any of these narrative veins, and instead presents something closer to a hybrid film that is part demo reel/part travelogue. The former frequently spotlights Andrea’s considerable musical talent (He plays numerous instruments, and is even shown scoring a film). The latter shows Andrea on a ship, in a car, wandering the streets (sometimes dragging a suitcase), talking on the phone, chasing loose chickens at the house of an old friend of his father’s, and many other perfectly normal but perfectly mundane things. His visit to see his mother (Moonlighting‘s Allyce Beasley) is nice, as are a handful of other scenes scattered throughout the film, but they all fail to tell the story that needs to be told. Instead, they tell things about the guy who happens to be a part of that story, and those things grow dull quickly.

There’s a strong possibility that Andrea Schiavelli is so emotionally guarded that Armenta got the most out of the young man that he possibly could. If that’s the case, Magic Island is a film that would have been better as an “inspired by” drama as opposed to a documentary.

It only took 10 minutes for Detective Jason Vanderwarf to get a search warrant to enter the home of Matthew Stewart, an Army vet growing a personal supply of illegal marijuana in his Ogden, Utah home. It’s up for debate if he knew the plain-clothed officers who broke into his home were police, but the unshakeable fact is that the raid left an officer dead and several other men (including Stewart) severely wounded. It’s one of four instances of alleged excessive force by police officers that directors Scott Christopherson and Brad Barber set their lens on in their compelling and all-too-timely documentary Peace Officer.

The crime scene looks a bit like a makeshift version of a Mission Impossible set. But instead of a grid of complex lasers for Tom Cruise to limbo over and under, crime scene investigator William “Dub” Lawrence has zig-zagged red and yellow string every which way (red indicating rounds fired by the police officers and yellow representing rounds fired by Stewart). After demonstrating projection angles and examining blood splatter, Lawrence, on his knees in the bathroom says, “If we calculated it right, the bullet would have fallen all the way to right here.” With a big grin on his face, he pulls out a bullet from under a hole in the wall. Noticing the distortion and skin fibers on the bullet and knowing who was standing where, he determines Officer Vanderwarf was shot by friendly fire—not Matthew Stewart. OK, so CSI wishes it was that compelling.

But this is real life, and not many people find the consequences entertaining. And what this scene demonstrates, finally, is logical evidence separated from the grief and anger that (perhaps, rightfully) colors a lot of the debate on this subject. It’s one thing, as many documentarians do (I’m looking at you, Michael Moore) to be angry and critical of a system. It’s another to prove it’s flawed with an equal dose of science and compassion. This even-keeled, logical exposé on the silent rise of militarization will certainly find an audience in a generation craving for an untainted source of information.

The filmmakers have an invaluable tool in Lawrence, who not only is a contract crime scene investigator but is also a former police officer and sheriff, and even more bizarrely, was the man who founded Utah’s first SWAT team. This same institution would go on to kill his son-in-law, Brian Wood, back in 2008. It’s become a personal obsession of Lawrence to sort out the case, and others like it, and having worked on a number of high profile cases (including breaking the Ted Bundy case), he’s unusually qualified. Also grounding the documentary is a fair share of history and archival footage dating even before SWAT (the film particularly points out the U.S.’s War on Drugs, and how our gradual reliance on no-knock raids began back in the Nixon era). Well-researched, considerate to both sides, and seamlessly edited to carry a trio of stories in an engaging way, Peace Officer is just about everything we can ask for from a social change-motivated documentary.

There is a huge difference when filmmakers do their homework and when they don’t. The colossal amount of information never feels slow because we’re recreating these scenes from half a dozen perspectives at some times—the parents, the police, the suspects, the prosecutors, journalists, legal action groups, and, of course, Lawrence with the science. We have media footage, police cam footage, and recreations that are graciously not at all cheesy, probably because they have the professional touch of an investigator, rather than the dramatic edge of an actor. For their first feature-length documentary, Barber and Christopherson, along with editor Renny McCauley, have created three (and later four) cohesive and compelling interweaving story lines.

The only place where the narrative feels forced at all is in a couplet of scenes in the film’s later third where Officer Jared Francom’s parents are shown revisiting the scene of their son’s death (he was fatally shot by Matthew Stewart), and the subsequent scene where Lawrence recalls a tragic story about his uncle, a police officer, dying as a result of injuries sustained on duty. Clearly, at this point we’re trying to make the good ol’ “police officers are doing their job most of the time” counterargument—a good and an important point, especially in a deeply human documentary—but it does come off feeling a bit intentional and less seamless than the rest of the film.

Perhaps getting in both sides of the story came a little too late (for instance, we start with the Brian Wood case, but never hear from the cops involved there). It’s a hurdle as a filmmaker when interviews are denied, but well-researched or not, this film’s bias feels clear. When we do get the opposite side, as with Detective Jason Vanderwarf (who suffered a bullet wound to the face, and doesn’t seem at all thrilled about the medals he received for the Matthew Stewart raid), it makes both sides seem human. And what a beautiful argument his inclusion makes in the film: Without the filmmakers explicitly having to make the argument themselves, he seems to be the symbol that excessive force isn’t just hurting the suspects, but the guys wielding the weapons as well. There’s nothing like a hole in a young officer’s face (by Lawrence’s estimates, shot by friendly fire) to put a hole in the argument that these weapons protect police. The reason the film maintains its integrity, and indeed the weight of its argument, is that it never points fingers at individual people, but rather at whole institutions. That’s crucial and somewhat new to this discussion. A good balance of heart and science, Peace Officer has the potential to set one heck of a ball rolling. Let’s hope it does.

Leny Wiggers has known love only once in her life. While on vacation in New Zealand, she met another woman and fell so far in love, she finally came out of the closet. She was 68 years old.

Making its international premiere at Hot Docs 2015 is Over the Rainbow, a delightful film about the now-80-year-old Leny and her life, courtesy of writer/director Tara Fallaux. Unlike many documentaries about individual subjects, this one, which clocks in at a lithe 39 minutes, doesn’t have a lot of detail to offer, either from the past or in the present.

In the past, Leny honored her dying father’s request and, from the age of 12, remained with her mother until the matriarch’s passing some 56 years later. As she answered the call of familial service and bore the burden of sexual secrecy, she watched everyone—including her own sister—grow up and move on with their lives.

Since the sad passing of her mother, and since her glorious emergence from the closet, the octogenarian has been making up for the time she seems to have lost to service and secrecy. She attends rallies and parades, offers stories and wisdom to other lesbians she meets, and parties pretty hard in discos, too. More often than not in her travels, Leny is the center of attention, and deservedly so.

Again, there is not much in the way of a life so full of occurrences as to warrant great detail of story, but this film isn’t about story; it’s about theme and inspiration.

The recurring theme of Leny’s life is one of freedom: from the absence of it to the reveling in it to the yearning for as much more of it as possible. Borne from that theme, and as a byproduct of Leny’s life path, comes the inspiration that sacrifice is not eternal, love can be found on any point along a timeline, and being alive means having life and when you have life, you have something you can make the most of.

It’s hard not to get immediately pulled into Uncertain by its first frames. Directors Ewan McNicol and Anna Sandilands (with McNicol also handling cinematography) shoot around Caddo Lake, a gorgeous area feeling like the textbook definition of “Southern Gothic.” With old, dilapidated houses lined up on the lakeside, barren trees sticking out of the water from every direction, and a nonstop cacophony of every insect and creature in and around the lake, Caddo Lake feels frozen in time. It’s a gorgeous location, one where nature appears to have easily won its battle against man. It’s the kind of place that’s beautiful in its ugliness and decay, and a rich area to explore beyond the lake.

McNicol and Sandilands settle down in the tiny town of Uncertain, population 94. It sits right on the border between Louisiana and Texas beside Lake Caddo, and is so small the town sheriff says “You have to be lost to find it.” Uncertain has a high poverty rate, and a crisis develops once a weed starts rapidly growing across the lake, choking out wildlife and threatening to destroy the lake’s fragile ecosystem. It threatens to cripple the town even further, considering their main source of income comes from fishing.

Some filmmakers might want to approach Uncertain as an environmental documentary, with a focus on efforts to try and save a town that’s been long forgotten. McNicol and Sandilands go in a far more interesting direction instead, using the lake as a thematic backdrop for three men living in Uncertain. Zach, 21, is a skinny young man with little to do in Uncertain. He lives alone ever since he had to commit his mother psychiatric care, and spends his days either playing video games or drinking at a bar. He’s diabetic, with an insulin pump attached to his body, and he can see a short life ahead of him if he keeps drinking and scraping by.

The second subject, Wayne, moved to Uncertain with his girlfriend while in recovery. He has a sordid past, with over a decade spent in prison. He’s changed his life, gotten in touch with his Native American roots, and now spends his time hunting boars. Wayne, like most people profiled in Uncertain, is full of quirks. Because he’s a convicted felon, according to Texas law he can only own guns from the 1800s, meaning he can only hunt with old rifles. The final person profiled is Henry, a 74-year-old fisherman. He lives alone, having recently lost his wife of over 50 years. It’s another major loss for Henry, who also lost his daughter years earlier in a tragic accident. The presence of the dangerous weed in the lake means he can’t fish as much as he’s used to, and spends most of his time with either his family or his new girlfriend.

What McNicol and Sandilands discover in this small town is remarkable. Zach, Wayne and Henry, one young, one middle-aged, and one in the twilight years of his life, have similar stories of loss, tragedy, and addiction, and all three are incredibly compelling people. Zach is a young, nerdy guy trying to find his own purpose in life, and his desire to move on to something fulfilling is endearing; Wayne is incredibly upfront about his own failures and the struggle to pave a new path in his life, and it can be heartbreaking to watch; and Henry is utterly fascinating, a man who simply wants to live life as he wants to after going through so much heartbreak. The fact that all three reside within the same small area, with lives that complement each other so beautifully feels like a magical combination McNicol and Sandilands were lucky enough to come across.

It’s not just the three subjects that make Uncertain such a wonderful documentary. McNicol and Sandilands find a way to, on a greater scale, give an incredible sense of what it’s like to live. The film has an innate understanding of how life unfolds in a continuous flow, rather than something structured or narrative. The struggle all three men face in their lives is ongoing, and will stay with them up to the end. If Zach is trying to get on the road to recovery, and Wayne is trying to stay on it, then Henry represents what it feels like to finally make it to the end of that road, with the knowledge that his end is coming soon.

The film gradually reveals more about the darker sides of each subject. They’re never treated as shocking reveals. They’re things that just happened to these people, the sorts of major events that can steer someone in a direction they never expected. All three acknowledge what’s happened to them and how it impacted their lives, but they also show an awareness that there’s nothing they can do but move on, and try to make things better for themselves. They’re men haunted by their pasts, yet focused on creating a future that they can look forward to. They need to move on because they have no choice. Time won’t wait for them.

Through all of this, Uncertain seamlessly weaves in the lake’s environmental troubles as a thematic tissue connecting these stories together, with the weed serving as a symbol of the darkness threatening to drag these men down, whether it’s alcoholism, drug addiction or something else. After finishing their portraits of Zach, Wayne and Henry, McNicol and Sandilands end with a small scene involving a scientist trying to kill off the weed in the lake. It is a perfect ending. Uncertain sets its sights on a small, forgotten town on the brink of death, and finds a beauty and hope within, something surprisingly human amidst a landscape that looks anything but. It’s a discovery worth celebrating.

Registered. Sex. Offender.

It’s hard to think of three other words that together elicit a more immediate and visceral sense of ill ease. Anecdotally, it seems the Registered Sex Offender receives less contextual benefit of the doubt than any other criminal. Maybe the thief was desperate and acted out of survival. Maybe the killer took a life in self-defense. Maybe the drunk driver hasn’t gotten proper help to tackle that addiction. With a Registered Sex Offender, though, guilt is never about maybes and always about degree. This is just one facet that directors Frida Barkfors and Lasse Barkfors tackle when they examine Registered Sex Offenders—or at least a very specific group of them—in Pervert Park, their Sundance Special Jury prize-winning documentary.

More formally known as Florida Justice Transitions, “Pervert Park” is a mobile home community in St. Petersburg, FL, where 120 registered sex offenders have made their home. The Park was founded by Nancy Morais, whose son—himself a registered sex offender—struggled to find a community that would accept him after getting released from jail. Every resident of the Park is on some form of parole or probation, and most live there for the duration of that stage of their punishment. While there, each resident receives counseling for two years. Morais has since retired, but the Park is managed and maintained by former residents. The film focuses on the stories of a select group of individuals who live there.

What a group of individuals that is, and what a film this is. Tackling sex offenders—especially a collection of them whose crimes involved, or were committed against, children—is no easy task. As the film’s subjects are quick to reiterate, prejudgement of the guilty reigns supreme in our society. The Backfors deftly counter this with a shrewd 1-2 combination.

First, they present what appears to be the stark truth about each offender as told by each offender. While there might be details omitted or blurred, each person fully admits to having committed the crime for which they have been found guilty. A couple of stories suggest unfortunate circumstances or even entrapment, while others confess to having done wrong, but no one says, “It wasn’t me.” Culpability is unanimous. Because these tales are told from the perspective of the perpetrator, they carry a unique weight.

Adding to that weight are the backstories of some of the offenders. Bill Fuery, the park’s maintenance man and primary subject of the film, had a horrendous childhood, and went through an even greater tragedy into his early adult life. Another offender spotlighted is the sole female subject of the film, Tracy Hutchinson. Her backstory, which she tells in detail, is simply unthinkable, haunting the mind long after the closing credits. It’s important to note, though, that not every backstory is as dramatic as these, and none of the stories are ever framed as justification for the crimes committed. Instead, they are offered as a way to make clear the offenders aren’t monsters; they’re people. They are also working hard at becoming better.

From a storytelling perspective, the co-writers/co-directors have an excellent feel for timing. No single story is told in one large chunk. Instead, each story is broken up in at least two parts, and longer stories like Fuery’s and Hutchinson’s are doled out across most of the film. Their stories in particular work well in this format, as there are multiple “WOW” moments for each of them. It might all sound dramatic, but it’s effective.

These backstories segue to the back-end of that 1-2 combination. Critical to the film’s success is what the Backfors don’t offer: rebuttal. This is not a primetime TV news magazine looking to make viewers judge and jury; this is a film where the directors know most viewers will already have a preconceived notion of the subjects, so there is no need (in this context) to present any “case” against these people. They know what they’ve committed, they all know how wrong it was, and they all know the scope of the damage done.

The film also presents a higher-level look at the residents as a collective, the (seemingly) positive effects of therapy in both individual and group settings, and some interesting statistics about sex offenders and recidivism when measured against other crimes, and when compared to the Florida Justice Transitions program specifically.

There are times, though, when the film wants to make a statement against “the system” as a greater whole, questioning the benefit of incarceration vs. therapy. It also includes some loose comments about the perceived overeagerness of law enforcement when it comes to capturing (read: entrapping) offenders. While these points are both valid and worth examination, how they are presented in the film borders on irresponsible, as they are mostly hollow accusations that feel like they are meant to elicit a visceral “damn the man” response from the viewer as (hopeful) cheap points for its subjects.  No points should be awarded.

Because of its subject matter, Pervert Park is a challenging watch, but one very much worth the effort. Over the course of the film’s lean 77-minute run time, the filmmakers find success in presenting their subjects as honestly as possible. They don’t ask for sympathy, but they do ask for consideration, and they earn it.

Mia Donovan’s Deprogrammed profiles Ted Patrick, the man who pioneered the practice of “deprogramming” cult members. During the ‘70s and ‘80s, a time when the media had a large fascination with cults, Patrick would get hired by desperate parents to help save their children from whatever pseudo-religion they joined. Patrick would kidnap his target, take them to an undisclosed location, and spend weeks berating them into rejoining society. He deprogrammed thousands of people for over a decade before new laws in the ‘80s wound up bankrupting him and putting him in prison.

Donovan certainly has a compelling figure on her hands, but Deprogrammed feels largely formless, as if it confused sitting on its hands with an objective approach. The film’s interview subjects, including Patrick himself along with several people he deprogrammed, make points both for and against Patrick’s methods, but nothing ever coheres into a salient point. It’s disappointing, although Donovan gets enough information out of her interview subjects that Deprogrammed never gets dull.

But perhaps the biggest sign of how Deprogrammed can feel misguided is how Donovan bookends her film. In the opening minutes, she reveals a personal connection to Patrick through her estranged stepbrother, who was kidnapped and deprogrammed as a teen for being into heavy metal music (this was at the height of “Satanic Panic” in the news). It’s an intriguing hook, but Donovan doesn’t return to it until the closing minutes. It’s a choice that’s somewhat baffling, considering how much potential it has (Donovan mentions that this is the first time she’s seen her stepbrother in almost two decades). There’s definitely a worthy film somewhere in Deprogrammed, but its lackadaisical final product is more letdown than triumph.

From my pre-teens through high school in the 1980s, I spent summers watching movies. During those countless hours of screen time, the most ambitious thing I ever did was go through a used copy of Halliwell’s Film Guide and check every movie I had ever seen, complete with notes in the margins.

Thrilling, I know.

This major milestone in my young, film-centric life is nothing compared to the cinematic endeavor a trio of Mississippi teens undertook in the 1980s: they filmed a shot-for-shot remake of Steven Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, starring themselves and their friends. The only scene they didn’t shoot was the airplane scene. Fast-forward over three decades when the trio decides to reunite and complete their feature-length homage. Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made, making its international premiere at Hot Docs on Sunday, April 26, documents that last leg of the boys’ amazing cinematic journey.

And what a sensational documentary Raiders! is, with strength of both story and storytelling. So many times, the appeal of a documentary rests squarely on the shoulders of its subject, not the documentarians. Raiders! isn’t like that. Sure, the story alone would be worth watching even if the telling of it were weak, but co-writers/co-directors Jeremy Coon and Tim Skousen don’t rest on that. These filmmakers know what they are doing when it comes to taking a good story and making it a great documentary. In fact, it’s more than one great documentary; it’s two.

One documentary is about the audacity of youth. With great energy and determination, but most importantly without knowing any better, three childhood friends—Eric Zala, Chris Strompolos, and Jayson Lamb—decided one summer to reshoot one of the greatest action films ever made. The shoot lasted seven summers and tested the mettle of the boys’ creativity, their parents’ patience, and the strength of their friendship.

The other documentary is about the power of ego. This is not a negative statement. Despite the fame the trio received for their effort; despite the cult status their film received with help from the likes of director Eli Roth, journalist Chris Gore, and Alamo Drafthouse owner Tim League; and despite what they had accomplished … the film wasn’t done. Everyone else might say, “They remade Raiders of the Lost Ark,” but they say, “We remade Raiders of the Lost Ark except … .” Now, at an age when the success of adulthood can help realize the dreams of childhood, that caveat can possibly (and finally) be removed.

Bridging these stories is the small but important piece about their post-audacity, pre-ego lives. The paths the boys took, which were paths that began in the later years of their original filming, are divergent indeed, and that sliver of story plays like a basic cable mash-up of “Behind the Scenes” and “Where Are They Now” specials (minus any unnecessary salaciousness).

Binding these stories is the film they made, the film they hope to finish: Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation. How this film was started, how it almost stopped before it started, how it finally stopped only an inch shy of the goal line, and how it restarted and carried on, is captured in a parallel presentation of documentary-style interviews with the trio, their family and friends, those aforementioned celebrities, and more. And don’t think the chances they took as boys were more dangerous than the risks they take as men. They may have almost burned down a house as youngsters, but as adults they have “real life” responsibilities that raise the stakes to levels their teenage selves would not have been able to comprehend.

How this is all combined is the film’s secret weapon, and without the precision cuts made by editor Barry Poltermann, this thing could be a muddled mess. Instead it’s lean and rhythmic, and every scene it cuts to from the past leaves you wanting another scene from the present, and vice versa.

Raiders!: The Story of the Greatest Fan Film Ever Made is a triumphant tale of fandom, filmmaking, family, and friendship. Less a making-of-within-a-making-of and more a pair of dueling, time-shifting stories, the documentary finds a great balance between the nostalgia of yesterday and the dreams of today.

The fact that armed drones have changed the face of warfare might not be common knowledge, but drones have wormed their way into pop culture and the general American consciousness; the grainy eagle-eye view popularized by video games, the bulbous head unmistakable, and the panic inducing concept of the Amazon drone. The point is, drones are here to stay, and Tonje Hessen Schei’s new documentary Drone seeks to explore the consequences of fighting a war from 10,000 miles away.

At its heart, Drone is centered in two places: with former drone operator Brandon Bryant as he speaks out against the US governments abuse of power, and human rights lawyers Shahzad Akbar and Clive Stafford Smith as they push to get media attention for victims of drone strikes in the Pakistani province of Waziristan. Spliced into these narratives are dozens of experts, from former military advisors to those who produce drones for the government. The portrait painted over the 79 minute doc (two breezier versions exist: a 58 minute cut, and a 10 minute one) is a tragic and complex one, rooted in the inherent value of human life and how it should be judged in a time of war. The ideas and questions asked are, ultimately, necessary, and have, for the most part, been ignored and swept under the rug—all of which makes Drone feel like a let down.

Schei has worked with humanitarian issues in the past, even directing a film festival based around the subject, and she sticks with it here. The film is pragmatic and refuses to shy away from the toughest questions concerning drones, while never forgetting the tragedy that sparked the war on terror. The trouble is that Drone never quite focuses anywhere. The film stops and starts at random, shifting between Bryant doing a press tour to Akbar and Smith petitioning the high court of Pakistan without any connective tissue. It’s as though Schei had too much to talk about (and all of it should be talked about), but couldn’t quite make it all fit without just tossing it in the bag at random; all of it interesting on its own, but jarred wildly by the constant gear shifts. Neither of the two main threads have much of a narrative either until the final minutes of the film, which keeps the film from becoming grounded or tense in an important way.

Drone is a movie that should be watched, and the conversations therein discussed. It is a well-intentioned film, and it’s packed with the horrific truths of America’s human rights abuses. But there’s a sense that Drone was built around the passion of its ideas (though it shouldn’t be faulted for that), not with any calculated structure or intentional direction. The result is a scatterbrained and tension-less film that still must be watched and talked about.

Before you go casting off Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck as yet another look into the life of one of rock’s legends, be aware that Brett Morgen’s documentary has something that distinguishes itself from other rock docs about Cobain: the full support and cooperation from Cobain’s family, along with Courtney Love, who gave Morgen access to everything she had on her late husband. The film weaves in drawings from Cobain’s own notebook, personal recordings, unreleased music, and home videos, along with plenty of other previously unseen material. Needless to say, Nirvana fans will be hard pressed to find a more definitive portrait of their fallen idol.

But Morgen’s documentary thankfully doesn’t turn into hagiography. Sure, it can be indulgent, like when it dedicates much of its 2+ hour runtime to animations of Cobain’s notebook drawings, but Morgen prefers to focus on demystifying much of Cobain’s reputation over the years since his suicide. It’s inherently fascinating material, but Morgen’s attempt to delve deep into Cobain’s life doesn’t prove to be especially illuminating. By the end, Cobain doesn’t really feel any less enigmatic, and the documentary only shows how it might never be possible to get a sense of who Cobain truly was. That feeling, or lack of feeling, ends up underlining the tragedy of Cobain’s death, as we’ll presumably never get to know much more than what Montage of Heck highlights (although the absence of Dave Grohl and Frances Bean Cobain in the doc echo throughout). Cobain will always remain mysterious to some degree, but Montage of Heck more than holds its own as a fitting tribute to his life and career.

There’s a cheap tactic documentarians like to lean on sometimes that I call the “pin drop moment”. It happens in talking head documentaries when some sort of major event or piece of information gets dropped on the viewer. To emphasize just how important this fact is, the director will cut to various interview subjects sitting silently. The intent is to give off the impression that everyone is stunned into silence over what just transpired on-screen (you could hear a pin drop!). In reality, it’s just footage of each talking head probably waiting for the next question to be asked.

Cheap manipulation tactics like the pin drop moment are second nature to Best of Enemies co-director Morgan Neville, who directed the overrated and poorly directed Twenty Feet From Stardom. In Best of Enemies, directors Robert Gordon and Morgan Neville present a bland, surface level presentation of one of television’s most memorable events: a 10 part debate between National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. and infamous writer Gore Vidal during the Republican and Democratic National Conventions in 1968. Both were highly renowned intellectuals at the time, and both stood at the opposite ends of the aisle. Buckley, a staunch conservative who’s credited with bringing in the Reagan era, found Vidal’s writing pornographic, and Vidal thought Buckley was as valuable as dirt.

ABC News aired the debates as a desperate move to improve ratings—they were dead last in the ratings—and it worked, only because the debates turned out to be more of a catfight than a discussion. Neville and Gordon don’t need to do much to entertain; watching Vidal and Buckley tear into each other is glorious to watch. But why do I need this movie when I can just watch the debates on YouTube? Neville and Gordon don’t really add much to the footage itself, other than giving some context and talking about how the debates impacted both men after the fact (Surprise: they never got over it!). This is boring infotainment at its finest, an excuse to give people basic facts (or, as Werner Herzog calls it, “the truth of accountants”) without trying to delve into anything interesting. The only time Best of Enemies suggests something worthwhile is when it argues that the debates signaled the beginning of the end of the golden era of TV news, with arguing pundits replacing objective reporting. But that argument only starts when, and I’m not kidding, the end credits start rolling. There can’t be a clearer sign of bad documentary filmmaking than reducing the most substantive part of your film to nothing more than an afterthought.

Dreamcatcher, director Kim Longinotto’s documentary following one woman’s efforts to stop (or at least relieve the effects of) human trafficking, wastes no time hitting the streets of Chicago’s most dangerous neighborhoods.

A few minutes in, and we’re already sitting shotgun to the film’s heroine Brenda Myers-Powell and her partner Stephanie Daniels-Wilson, as they drive their van throughout town, giving a warm ear to working women who need to talk and condoms to those who aren’t quite ready. These stories get dire quick—one of the earliest stories comes from a woman who had been stabbed 19 times and lived to talk about it. She questions why her friends succumbed to their wounds, and yet here she is, living but not really living.

Brenda’s partner, another middle-age woman, offers the only nugget of hope: “When you get sick and tired of being sick and tired, you call us, and let us help.” The woman declines—and yet, as is often the case in this film, a sense of hope still lingers.

The reason why this film captures that unexpected redemptive spirit despite dealing with victims of the sex trade, many of whom are high-school aged, lies completely on the shoulders of the film’s star, Brenda. After 25 years on those same streets, a brutal attack left her literally skinned alive—she alludes to the reconstructive surgery to regain her “womanhood,” her face. She started The Dreamcatcher Foundation as a means to intervene in young women’s lives, allowing them the emotional—and when possible legal or financial—support they need to recover.

For people who follow the documentary format, the most obvious comparison Longinotto’s film will recall is A&E’s long-running docuseries Intervention. There are a few differences (other than the sort of addiction) that make this film a bit different from your run-of-the-mill hit-rock-bottom story—the most obvious is Brenda herself. I’ve seen a fair chunk of Intervention’s nine seasons, and purely as a viewer, I have to say, sometimes those interventions gone awry (the ones where the subjects turn volatile as they’re threatened with losing privileges like their home or financial support) made me feel squeamish. Is it effective? I’m not the one to say. But it must feel a bit degrading, even humiliating, and here I am watching this person lose all sense of autonomy from the comfort of my living room. Perhaps, the reason Dreamcatcher feels less hopeless is because Brenda’s methodology completely removes the shame factor. There is no timeline to say “yes.” She’s on these women’s side whether or not they seek help, and whether or not they relapse once they do. That sort of system seems more in touch with reality.

I could say this film has a lot of heart, but that’s an easy assessment to make about a film that takes on a worthwhile cause. Its true strength is that the filmmakers have found such an effective subject in Brenda—who is not just an inspiring person, but shines on screen with all the sass and attitude of a women who could be running her own talkshow, if she weren’t too busy using her words to save lives. Because she’s so effective at what she does, a lot of the film’s arguments are made without explicitly having to say them. Clearly, the strongest medicine a psychologically damaged young woman on the street can be given is another human being. That seems to beg the question, how do we get more state-sponsored versions of Brenda? Secondly, by the filmmakers smartly choosing to focus on the women and not the act (we never see these women in sexually compromising situations), we’re left to remember their humanity. This film, which is comprised entirely of group or one-on-one dialogues, is a montage of women articulating the full range of their emotions. My guess is that chance at self-awareness is not often allotted to many of these women. And it feels real. Brenda, being from the street herself, can talk colloquially, and the filmmakers technically match this on-the-ground approach. We don’t have any studio-lit, dramatic macro-shot interviews. The most touching scene, where Brenda has a bit of a breakdown in her car thinking about the time she’ll need to take away from the women during an upcoming surgery, feels like someone just talking to themselves in the rearview mirror. The film doesn’t pull any cinematic magic tricks to make this woman a hero—she already is one.

The end result is, yes, viewers will know more about The Dreamcatcher Foundation and its co-founder Brenda Myers-Powell, but I think they’ll develop a lot of compassion for the half dozen women at the center of the film as well. When Brenda allows a former pimp to talk at a conference in Las Vegas, she encourages the crowd to keep an open mind because knowledge is power. And maybe for legal reform, that’s what we need: A bit of information. A bit of skepticism about how much of a choice a life of prostitution really is. A curiosity as to whether our courts are trying victims as criminals. Obviously Brenda is one woman and this is just one film, but both have done a commendable job in starting a compelling conversation.

When I started watching Committed, I thought it was some sort of elaborate joke on the part of co-directors Howie Mandel, Reed Grinsell and Steve Sunshine. The film starts with Vic Cohen, a longtime aspiring comedian, performing a set to an empty room. Mandel explains that, when he had a talk show in the late 1990s, he received daily joke pitches from Cohen. Mandel was taken by Cohen’s commitment (expect to hear that word repeated endlessly), and eventually hired him on the show as a writer. Since then, Mandel has become friends with Cohen, spending the last 13 years filming their interactions.

From the beginning, the documentary’s point is clear: Cohen isn’t particularly good at comedy. He’s actually pretty bad at it, with most of his jokes relying on stripping down to his underwear for cheap laughs. But, as Mandel repeatedly states throughout, Cohen has a relentlessly optimistic attitude and a drive to keep doing what he loves, and that alone is plenty admirable. I mean, sure, Cohen’s outlook on life is easy to admire, but Committed sure does a piss-poor job of effectively showing it.

If anything, Committed shows Cohen as someone who got lucky when he got the attention of a famous comic. The filmed segments, all of them feeling like they came from a failed attempt at making the same film years earlier, come across as mean-spirited, with Mandel making Cohen do things like audition for the role of a munchkin or a Rockettes dancer. There’s really nothing funny or inspiring about these clips. They’re just lame attempts to get some laughter out of watching Cohen make himself look like a fool.

There is one highlight early on when Mandel lets Cohen open for him at a live show, even though Cohen, who just declared his intention to do stand-up, doesn’t have any material written out yet. Cohen and Mandel wind up meeting Debbie Reynolds before the show, and she gives Cohen a silly suggestion for what to do on stage. Cohen actually takes her half-hearted advice, and takes it to such an extreme that his debut performance winds up alienating the crowd before eventually winning them over. Cohen’s “routine” (if one could call it that) is the only legitimately funny moment in all of Committed, and the only part that encapsulates everything the film is going for thematically. Unfortunately, Committed turns into something far more nasty, stale, and unfunny from there.

It’s rare to see films provide such a direct look at the human condition, let alone in 40 minutes, but that’s just what Polish documentary The End of the World does. Over its very brief yet perfect runtime, director Monika Pawluczuk turns her camera on different people across Warsaw just after midnight on December 21st, 2012 (also known as the Mayan Apocalypse, for those who still remember). A radio host starts his call-in show, asking people to call in and discuss how they feel about the supposed final day on Earth. In another area of Warsaw, a 911 dispatcher fields calls from people throughout the city, ranging from a woman having a seizure to people drunkenly dialing in for no good reason.

The film’s structure turns out to be a fascinating one, with the more introspective radio callers acting as a nice counterbalance to the immediacy of the 911 calls. At the radio show, callers end up talking about the different meanings of the word “apocalypse,” whether it’s literal or something more figurative (someone says losing their job was an apocalypse, while another caller says his world ended when his mother died). Pawluczuk also takes her camera out to the streets, tagging alongside a taxi driver as he talks about losing his wife to a passenger. The camera gives off a detached, observant vibe, as it views people through apartment windows or watches different CCTV cameras throughout the city. It’s an enjoyable experience, and within the context of the potential doomsday scenario, The End of the World provides plenty to chew on. While watching people nonchalantly go about their lives in the face of the apocalypse, it’s neat to see how much existence can get in the way of the very thing that threatens to end it.

I am proud to say I was there for the birth of the Video Party Era.

If you are unfamiliar, in the early days of VHS, when players were not as common as they would eventually become, kids whose parents owned VCRs would host video parties. The setup was simple: take about a dozen high schoolers, feed them all the pizza, snacks, and soda that could fit on a kitchen table, and huddle them around a TV, where ’80s VHS rental staples—from slasher flicks to T&A comedies—played until curfew. It was glorious. While I presumed then that such parties were happening around the country, I didn’t realize (in my adolescent naïveté) they were going on around the world. What I also didn’t realize was how different, how amazing, and how critical certain Eastern European video parties were to the people attending them.

In Romania circa 1985, the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu was in its 20th year, bringing to a close a second decade of stifling oppression. There was speech, but it wasn’t free. There was media, but it wasn’t independent. There was TV, but it wasn’t much: one channel ran two hours of state-controlled programming each day. That was it.

The residents knew of movies, but all they were permitted to see were state-edited films, most of which originated from parts of the world other than the West, and those films were only shown in state-run theaters. This drove some people to purchase illegal VCRs and bootleg tapes on the black market. Those people would then invite other people—for an admission price—to secretly watch movies in cramped apartments all night long. Romania’s film-lovers of all ages found the experience to be glorious.

With tales of VHS parties and a collection of clips from ’80s movies any US film buff would recognize (including quintessential titles like Top Gun, Dirty Dancing, The Terminator, and more), Chuck Norris vs. Communism positions itself to be an exercise in nostalgia. With its geopolitical backdrop and Cold War era position on the timeline, the film also wants to be a history lesson. It does both well, but it’s when it goes deeper into those areas that it shifts into a more powerful gear.

From the historical perspective, Calugareanu takes needed time to tell the stories of two figures of great consequence to the success of the underground VHS movement and that movement’s importance. The first story is that of Teodor Zamfir, the man responsible for pirating the tapes in the first place. At the height of his considerable influence, he was using 360 VCRs to create copies of tapes he would sell for enormous profits.

The other story is that of Irina Nistor, the woman who dubbed all the voices on all the tapes, male and female. It was her voice every Romanian came to know through multiple (and repeat) viewings of every tape they could lay their hands on.  Her voice became such a prominent feature of the underground tape scene that when a man was brought in to help her dub films because the volume of recordings she had to work on was growing too high, Romanian viewers dismissed those tapes as bootlegs of bootlegs, and were somehow inferior to the Nistor tapes.

As for the importance of the movement, the tapes represented a window to the West for the oppressed people of Romania, and the films offered those people hope there was better living out there somewhere, and maybe they had a shot of living that better life, too.

But it’s the added nostalgia facet that makes the film special. Rather than round up the usual suspects of movie experts and film historians, Calugareanu lets the story be told by the people who helped make the story in the first place: the citizens of Romania who hosted and/or attended illegal video parties in the 1980s. Having these stories told in the first-person turns the interesting into the fascinating, and as these folks dig deeper into their memories, they tap into an incredible sense of joy and wonder for the past that took me back to my own early movie-watching days and those video parties of my teenage years.

As someone who not only lived through the ’80s but still revisits its like-totally-awesomeness via film on a regular basis, I found Chuck Norris vs. Communism to be more than a fascinating documentary; I found it to be a history lesson, decorated in nostalgia, telling the story of people who were more like us than we ever realized, at a time in our country’s history when we thought they couldn’t be more different.

For the last 88 years, The Holy City of the Wichitas, located within the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge in Lawton, OK, has played host to an annual Easter passion play, “The Prince of Peace.” But this is no simple reenactment in a church parking lot. Produced on 66 acres of land cultivated to look like biblical Jerusalem, the production is so expansive, it requires its actors to pantomime their actions and mouth their dialogue while other actors recite the lines over a PA system for viewers situated in Audience Hill. It is a labor of love for local residents who, over decades and across generations, have worked hard every year as actors, producers, costume designers, volunteers, etc. The production, though, has a problem.

The actor who has played Jesus Christ for the last eight years is retiring from the role, so the producers must replace him, and quickly. They do so with Zack, a young man whose body type might not align with the common image of the Son of God, but whose flowing locks and goodhearted enthusiasm have everyone excited for the coming year’s show. This puts pressure on Zack not simply to perform, but to decide how to reveal to the town a secret he carries; it’s a secret that might jeopardize his role in the play.

There are three main story threads in Jesus Town, USA. The first is the history of the 88-year tradition, and the film provides a well-measured lesson on it. The filmmakers are wise to avoid getting lost in too much timeline detail, opting instead to focus mostly on an oral history. It serves the material well, especially considering some of the town’s residents have been around for more than 40 years, so there’s a lot of “speaking from experience” presented. These anecdotes are sprinkled throughout the film.

The second is the commentary on faith in America and how this town is carrying that torch. The film touches on this subject early when it mentions a higher-level concern that the passion play’s attendance has been steadily dwindling for years. At its peak (and that was early in its history), the play boasted an audience in excess of 200,000 people, but current numbers are nowhere near that mark. Locals speculate the drop-off in interest has to do with society drifting away from spirituality. The film goes no further than this, leaving the hypothesis of America’s heartland as the only possible reason for the decline. There is no analysis to back up these claims of what the fine people of middle America believe to be true.

The third story thread is the basket in which the filmmakers place almost all their Easter eggs: the Quest for the new Christ. While this is the most compelling of the three themes, it is also the most poorly executed, and to great detriment to the film.

Jesus Town, USA’s press notes makes a comparison between this film and Christopher Guest’s Waiting For Guffman. The similarities — in both content and tone — are clearly recognizable, and suggest inspiration was drawn from the Guest’s film. The problem is Guest’s film is a “mockumentary” cast with professional actors working from a Hollywood script (when not brilliantly improvising). This film is supposed to be an actual documentary featuring everyday townspeople who want their story told. Mintz and Pinder take the denizens of the latter and attempt to tell their tale with the awkward quirkiness and mocking humor of the former and it simply doesn’t work. It puts its subjects in a something of a negative light.

One major sin is that many scenes are clearly staged, forcing the locals to have to act. With great respect to what they do each Easter, they cannot act, and every scene is as challenging to watch as the one before it. It is no fault of theirs for that, by the way. That blame rests with the filmmakers. The townspeople are also framed in ways to suggest they are simple people who, while not necessarily full-blown intolerant, are at least intolerance-adjacent, and that’s unfair. If these people are in on the (unfunny) joke, that is never revealed, so there is no reason to think they are.

The big sin, though, is how Zack is presented. He seems like a very nice guy, and the secret he wrestles with revealing is worthy of genuine pathos. Instead, he’s presented as something of the town rube – the kid who plays jokes at the drive-thru speaker box of the local burger joint; the kid who owns nunchucks because he always wanted to be a ninja; the kid who spends his downtime playing video games while his girlfriend watches him play. This is great for Zack; I deny him none of the simple pleasures life offers him. It simply makes for dull storytelling, and a filmmaker needs to treat the centerpiece of the film with more importance than treatment reserved for a character player.

There’s a real documentary waiting to be made about the town known here as Jesus Town, USA. Unfortunately, this wannabe mockumentary isn’t it.

On March 16, 2013, Sunil Tripathi walked out of his apartment in Providence, Rhode Island, and vanished. The story of his disappearance, though, is only a fraction of the story that he became associated with in the following month. Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi is an ambitious documentary, one not only interested in exploring the viral and ultimately volatile Internet fallout in the hours following the Boston Marathon bombings, but also one not willing to forget the people, the family, and the boy at its center: Sunil himself. The result is a fascinating and heartbreaking piece of cinema, one that highlights how quickly people turn vicious and how, despite everything, love can endure all.

For all of this, Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi is, first and foremost, about Sunil. As his buoyant family describes him, Sunil was a perpetually happy child, a boy who could always be found wearing a grin. He was passionate about music, studying the saxophone methodically, eventually taking his skill to Brown University before becoming a philosophy major. Through here, the film moves quickly, establishing Sunil through interviews with his sister Sangeeta, brother Ravi, mother Judy, and father Akhil, along with a deep archive of photographs, through which we watch him grow into a 22-year-old man. But during his junior year at Brown, Sunil grew distant, and then deeply depressed, as he struggled to finish up the year, and decided not to return in the fall.

Then Sunil walked out of his apartment and into the night. And in the weekend following his disappearance, his family, both immediate and distant, refused to sit idle. Instead of waiting to see what the police would do, they set up an operating base on the Brown campus and began their own search, the scale and magnitude of which was wildly impressive. But the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into a month. The family though was not ready to give up. Then, on April 15, 2013, almost exactly a month after Sunil’s disappearance, the Boston Marathon was bombed. And for a day or so, these two events stayed as separate as they were, until a subreddit dedicated to helping identify the then unidentified Suspect 1 and Suspect 2 made the leap: might Suspect 2 be the missing Brown student? The idea caught like wild fire. Then, Suspect 2 was Sunil Tripathi.

For all intents and purposes, this is where Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi blossoms into a necessary film. For the first half of its run time, we follow the Tripathi family as they refuse to give up hope, ever expanding their search, gaining steam on social media, and trumpeting the importance of love and family. Throughout, director/cinematographer Neal Broffman gives a fierce sense of setting; Providence is gorgeously captured, a sort of constant winter, dark and chilly, the river placid and menacing. Broffman juxtaposes this cold with the warmth of the interviews from Sunil’s family and friends, all of whom are magnetic–Sangeeta and Ravi especially, the familial love obvious. When the film switches gears, it does so nicely. Certain sections uncoil like a thriller, while others act as meditations, looking to meticulously piece together the events following the misidentification and the dark implications of this new crowd-sourced crime fighting era.

And while most of the film fires on all cylinders, it is still, at times, the film of an director early in his career. For instance, all the Fincher-esque blue-tinted shots of Providence make the filtered and awkwardly staged shots of Sangeeta and Ravi staring into the distance stand out noticeably (even when their intention is clear). And while this writer wasn’t bothered by the convoluted set up of interviews following the misidentification, the technique clearly drew attention to itself, probably needlessly, and will likely cause some dissonance among viewers. Nonetheless, the film handled the heavy integration of Tweets and Reddit posts better than most, and, in one scene, incredibly.

A film like this could have gone on longer than its breezy 75 minute run time. It even could have been two films. But what makes Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi so successful is its duality. The film is not just about the poignant disappearance of a troubled young man (one of thousands yearly in the US). Nor is it about the utterly tragic nightmare the collective internet unleashed upon an innocent family in a matter of hours. It’s about both. It’s about Sunny and the future. And, like every good documentary, it asks more questions than it answers. It should be watched, and its questions should be asked. Because, ultimately, it is a film that says, “We’re people and we’re still here.”