On March 11, 1989, Cops premiered on American TV. The reality show—still going strong today after 33 seasons—pairs camera crews with American law enforcement, giving small-screen viewers a front row seat to the day-to-day protection provided by the men and women of countless local, state, and federal jurisdictions. Invoking memories of Cops comes Ukrainian Sheriffs, a ride-along documentary from director Roman Bondarchuk.

The doc follows the exploits of a pair of sheriffs—Victor and Volodya—in the remote Ukrainian village of Stara Zburjivka. The duo, appointed by village Mayor Viktor Marunyak, respond to any and all calls from the town’s 1,800 residents, be they issues as mundane as domestic complaints or as serious as the discovery of a dead body. With cameras ever at the ready, the film is reminiscent of that American reality crime show.

Truth be told, Ukrainian Sheriffs pales in comparison to Cops from the angle of pure onscreen gratification. Where the US television show has the luxury of cherry-picking from only the sauciest of crimes recorded, this film, despite covering a period of time that is at least a year long (based only on seasonal clues), has very little excitement in the area of criminal activity. Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe, in a town of 1,800 citizens, things like broken windows and domestic squabbles are good to be the worst things these men see. But that doesn’t make it a compelling documentary. And while it’s quaint that Victor and Volodya are less enforcers of law and more voices of reason (arbitrating conflict in most cases and deferring real crime to Ukrainian police officials), it all grows tiresome.

Bondarchuk also struggles to find anything interesting in the personal lives of his two protagonists. The film attempts to humanize these individuals, but instead only succeeds in giving the viewer a look behind a very dull curtain, revealing activity that isn’t interesting beyond the base curiosity of seeing how people live in a part of the world otherwise unknown.

Where the film excels, though, is its look at the bigger political picture. The film is slow to start, but as it gets going, it delves into political areas similar to those found in other Ukraine-centric docs like Maidan and Winter on Fire, by visiting and revisiting the escalating Crimean tensions. However, Ukrainian Sheriffs does so on a local scale—namely, how the national crisis and the battle with Russia could affect local men subject to being drafted. It’s thought-provoking stuff that offers insight into the conflicting approaches to responsibility, survival, and patriotism that these men wrestle with, and that other men judge them on.

As a whole, Ukrainian Sheriffs can’t meet the challenge to make its own subject matter interesting. It might have its moments, but those moments aren’t enough to compensate for the rest. This is a film best suited for Ukrainian doc completists or people with a vested interest in the regional ongoings.

The story behind Dean Fleischer-Camp’s documentary Fraud is an interesting one. The director is said to have stumbled upon footage on YouTube—over 100 hours worth—of a American middle-class family of four living out their lives in front of a video camera, but this isn’t just any wannabe reality story. Fleischer-Camp pared that footage down to a scant 52 minutes to paint a picture of a man and woman so materialistic, they would jeopardize their own freedom and their children’s future for the chance to spend, spend, spend.

The family of four—thirty-something parents and two young children both under the age of about seven—is introduced to the viewer on 5/26/12 (according to the camera’s date stamp). Little is known about the family other than what can put together through the footage: they live in a small, cluttered house, suggesting lower-middle-class, and they are obsessed with anything related to an affluent lifestyle. As their bills mount and their resources dwindle, the family takes desperate measures to improve their cash flow so they can live what they perceive to be the good life, consequences be damned. The film ends on 10/3/12.

Less than five minutes into Fraud, I had my hand raised, calling shenanigans (please forgive the granularity of the next paragraph; it’s in support of a greater point).

At the film’s start, The Man, who does 99% of what presents itself as around-the-clock filming, records The Woman reading a pair of bank notices. The first notice is a decline letter for a new credit card. The other is in reference to a bounced payment. I understand the narcissistic obsession that comes with self-recording, but that The Man would record something as humiliating to himself and his family as that, and The Woman wouldn’t object, felt like a stretch. Still, and despite any change in tenor to The Family’s mood, I allowed that maybe reaction shots and debates had been edited out. I allowed it, that is, until the next scene where, in the interest of raising money, The Family has a yard sale. By the time the dust settles, they take their loot and head off to several retailers, including an Apple store, where everyone in The Family scores a new iPhone.

I called shenanigans again. Their declined credit card application suggests they were maxed out on their existing plastic, and the bounced payment suggests they were cash-strapped too, leaving only their yard sale earnings to fuel their shopping spree. I’ve never known a yard to generate north of $1000 in a single afternoon, and while the quick cuts of the film don’t afford a good look at the wares on sale, The Family’s living conditions suggest they didn’t have anything of high value to begin with, nor did they have a high quantity of lower-value items to unload.

This sequence is a terrific example of the film’s strength—it moves fast—but it’s also emblematic of the film’s great, great problem: it strains credulity from start to finish. Even if the action in the first five minutes of the film is factual, it raises such an eyebrow that all subsequent moments become the subject of intense scrutiny. That scrutiny then helps expose other improbable actions and events, up to and including the crime the film is named after and the subsequent cover-up; blatant timeline discrepancies between when events actually happen and the time stamp of the video; more private, humiliating moments filmed without shame or objection; the complete absence of questions from people The Family interacts with; and, perhaps most unsettling, the lack of any sense of genuine emotion between The Man and The Woman (and by extension, The Kids). These two people are more like high school buddies than a committed couple, and not once did I believe they were emotionally involved with each other or their children.

By the end of the film, so many unbelievable events and moments and decisions had happened, I called shenanigans on all 52 minutes. In a world where anyone is capable of anything, and anyone is capable of filming anything they are capable of, the four months this family spends on a money-burning binge rang as improbable as anything can.

And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about the film after it was over…and the next day, too. Despite the superficiality of it, I couldn’t deny how mesmerizing it was. Part of this is because of the audacity of the director, but the other part of it, the larger part of it, is that while this so-called family might not have gone through those onscreen moments “in real life,” a lot of families in America have indeed suffered (or enjoyed, depending on how you look at it) some of those moments—living beyond their financial means, committing fraud, endangering children, you name it—all in the name of being able to spend money they otherwise wouldn’t normally have to spend. The nuclear (wasted) family Fleischer-Camp presents onscreen is like a composite of the unseemly denizens of an America obsessed with materialism and wealth, and it is chilling.

Therein lies the dilemma in terms of rating this film. As a documentary, it’s bad, and the title is apt. In fact, I wouldn’t even grant this specious work a “docudrama” moniker. But as a piece of visual art, effectively lean in runtime and edited with surgical precision, its statement on the skewed perceptions of the importance of money versus responsibility held by so many Americans, is like nothing I’ve seen before. That it achieves this without passing judgment makes it all the more impressive. Fraud is not a documentary about one family; it’s a reflection on a culture—a reflection that is as hard to look at as it is as hard to look away from.

When Sonita premiered last year at Amsterdam’s documentary film festival IDFA, it walked away with the audience award, a win that isn’t too surprising considering the film’s story. Director Rokhsareh Ghaem Maghami follows Sonita, an 18-year-old Afghan immigrant living with her sister and niece in Iran. Sonita is a restless creative, who aspires to become a rapper despite the personal, cultural, and political hurdles in her way. And perhaps the biggest hurdle comes from Sonita’s own family, who tell her she needs to come back home so they can force her into an arranged marriage. The reason for the marriage is purely financial: they’ll be selling her off to another family, and by doing so will have enough money to pay for the wedding of Sonita’s brother.

Sonita plays out as a conventional success story, and Maghami’s commitment to this structure eventually holds the film back from exploring issues beyond Sonita’s own story. It’s an issue that comes to a head around the midway point when Sonita is days away from being taken back to Afghanistan. After Sonita’s mother says she’ll postpone the wedding if they get some money, Maghami considers paying the family off herself, a breach of ethics that even her own crew tells her to avoid doing. Maghami’s transparency about her own involvement into the story, along with her selfish intentions (at one point she says that if Sonita goes to Afghanistan her movie will be over), adds a layer of complexity that winds up highlighting her film’s shortcomings.

By paying off Sonita’s family to let her stay in Iran, Maghami exposes her desire to mold the film in a way that fits the success story narrative. And while Maghami’s openness about becoming a direct player in her film is commendable, it’s not a topic she dwells on too much; the debate over her actions gets swept under the rug not long after it’s brought up, and the focus switches over to Sonita making a music video for her first proper single. It’s not the manipulation itself that’s bothersome (documentaries always manipulate in some form or another, and the expectation of objectivity is an archaic one), it’s that Maghami does it to help her film follow a smooth, accessible narrative arc.

Still, Maghami has found a compelling presence in Sonita, and her film has a feel-good quality that’s undeniable. But it’s hard to remove the feeling that, because of her motivations, Maghami is less of an observer and more of a puppet master.

The implicit trust that comes with viewing documentaries gets abused in Penny Lane’s NUTS!, a documentary about an interesting—and overlooked—story from Depression-era America. The subject in Lane’s film is Dr. John Romulus Brinkley, a doctor from Kansas who attempted to cure impotence by putting goat testicles into his patients. The method appeared to work, and Brinkley went on to be a success, turning his fortune into an empire when he invested it into building a radio station. As Brinkley’s success grew, the American Medical Association began targeting him because of his unorthodox medical practices, taking him to court and trying to ruin his businesses. Lane tells Brinkley’s story entirely through animated re-enactments, with a few talking head interviews along the way.

If the idea of goat testicle transplants curing impotence sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is; Brinkley was nothing more than an excellent con artist who took advantage of the placebo effect to paint himself as a medical genius. And Lane, taking inspiration from Brinkley, structures her film as a con job on viewers, treating Brinkley’s story as true until she pulls back the curtain in the final act. But Lane’s decision to deceive is misguided. In her attempt to point out how people are easy to let themselves be duped Lane only highlights the staleness of her message, along with the ethical murkiness of lying about such slight material. In reality, Lane’s deception is fueled by entertainment more than anything, as it gives her the ability to manufacture a twisty narrative while excusing her own behaviour by explaining herself at the end.

If NUTS! had a purpose for its narrative structure beyond trying to pull a fast one on viewers for kicks, it might have been less objectionable. Instead, Lane takes advantage of non-fiction for petty and selfish reasons, which makes Lane not too far removed from her own subject.

Watching a documentary filmed in real-time is always fascinating to me. Unlike a traditional doc that starts with an idea and involves months of planning, research, scheduling, and execution, a real-time doc feels much more adventurous; the filmmakers are just as unaware of what will happen next as the viewers. It requires a little luck, too. Picking a compelling subject for a traditional doc is one thing, but for something compelling to happen to a subject in a real-time doc is another thing entirely. Director Christy Garland hopes to capture some of that magic in Cheer Up.

The city of Rovaniemi, Finland is located at the Arctic Circle and, as one might expect, offers a stunning and picturesque winter landscape. But in addition to all that beautiful snow and cold, the city is home to the Ice Queens, a competitive cheerleading squad led by Coach Miia. The term “competitive” is as literal as it is generous, though. The squad technically competes at the Finnish National Qualifiers, but they are dreadful, even to the amateur eye. Tired of losing and tired of coaching a lackluster team, Miia seeks inspiration where nobody does cheerleading better: Dallas, Texas, USA. At Cheer Athletics, Miia visits with the staff and squads who put on a cheering (and coaching) clinic, producing the kind of results Miia could only dream about. Dazzled by the energy of the staff and the commitment of the cheerleaders, Miia returns home energized and ready to make some changes for—and to—the squad, until developments happen in her personal life that change the course of the team’s collective future.

In her third feature documentary, Christy Garland doesn’t simply cover the sad-sack exploits of the cheerless cheer squad. She also focuses her lens on the private lives of three individuals from the team: Coach Miia and two teenage cheerleaders, Aino and Patricia. On the surface, they are all unique. Aino is the raven-haired rebel, smoking behind the school and partying at night when she isn’t trying to land a flip. Patricia is the girl-next-door, but one garnering sympathy with a life marred by the loss of her mother. And Miia is the single woman whose obsession with Marilyn Monroe ranges from decorations on her walls to bleach-blonde hair and a “Monroe piercing” above her lip.

While these differences make the young women unique, and while cheerleading connects them, what bonds them (unbeknownst to them) are their fractured relationships with men and their sometimes staggeringly-poor life choices. Aino rushes to live with her immature boyfriend, Patricia is at stubborn odds with her father, and Miia’s man trouble defies even a veiled mention here for fear of revealing too much.

This is the kind of narrative that makes real-time documentary filmmaking so great—a director chooses a general topic that is unique, finds the smaller stories within the larger tale that might lead to something special, and pursues those stories. All of these components are present in Cheer Up, and yet the magic never quite happens.

Most of where Garland struggles is with trying to keep the story compelling. The monotony of the lives of these women seeps through the screen to turn the experience into a monotonous experience. This is no indictment of the women or their lives, but rather how they are presented on film. It’s as if Garland is concerned with being melodramatic, so she reigns everything in so tightly she creates something anti-dramatic. The result is observation to a fault.

Even the most structured and well-planned of documentaries need some kind of drama, so surely a real-time doc needs it too. Cheer Up doesn’t have it.

Garland also retreats from any kind of ongoing focus on the cheerleading aspect of the story, instead occasionally returning to it as a reminder that, oh yes, this is what these girls do. There are moments in practice when Miia pushes the girls harder, and there are moments when more than one girl loses a little blood in the process, but it’s all very rote in its revisitation. The lessons learned in life never translate to lessons learned in the gym, nor vice-versa.

Cheer Up is incredibly well-intended and has some good moments, particularly Sari Aaltonen’s cinematography. But with its flat presentation and dearth of any riveting moments, the film plays more like an after-school special about the pitfalls of teen decision-making than it does a documentary about young women struggling to make something more of their lives.

Wizard Mode, from directors Nathan Drillot and Jeff Petry, is named after a term used in the pinball community. Some pinball machines have something akin to a video game’s hidden or locked bonus level achieved after executing a series of difficult tasks. Salazar attempts to make a metaphoric connection between this achievement and the achievements of Robert Gagno, a top-10 globally ranked competitive pinball player and a twentysomething young man suffering from autism, who has been trying to live his life as normally as possible.

At a high level, the metaphor works. Just as Gagno strives to win pinball tournaments, climb the world rankings, and achieve “wizard mode” in those machines that have it, he realizes over the course of the film he has to put the same kind of focus on gaining his independence. He has goals—a job, a driver’s license, living on his own, and eventually romance—but it will take a “wizard mode”-level effort to achieve this.

Presented in the film are some components one would expect about the life of an autistic pinball wizard, like old home movies flashing back to Gagno’s youth while haunting voiceovers from his parents offer memories of learning about their son’s condition. There’s also footage of some tournaments Gagno competes in (with his father playing the role of chaperone, driver, and coach), plus a who’s who of globally ranked pinball players, about each of whom Robert can point out player strengths. But with the exception of that narrated home footage, none of these parts are the least bit compelling in their presentation. Even the moments at the tournaments—regardless of how Gagno performs at them—fail to generate any sense of excitement or intensity.

Those tournament scenes also expose two fatal flaws in the film. The first is that it’s incredibly one-sided. Perspectives are offered from Gagno and his parents, but the pinball community is not tapped to speak to the type of person or player Gagno is. The second is more of a technical issue: Salazar doesn’t know how to make pinball very interesting. There is a lot of visual action in the game of pinball, from the speed of the silver sphere to how much of a nudge will earn the player a tilt. All of that visual action, combined with the glorious sound of an arcade running at full speed, should grab the viewer’s attention, but that never happens.

Despite some strengths, Wizard Mode’s inability to ever find a rhythm is too much for the film to bear. Gagno seems like a good person, and pinball sure looks fun, but in this film neither of them are sold very well.

One of the great joys for fans of true independent documentary filmmaking is having the chance to hear stories that might not otherwise be told. High-profile documentaries are great, and those stories need to be heard as well, but for every flashy doc there are countless other docs that offer unique glimpses into unknown lives, uncharted worlds, and times that have long since passed. Such is the story of Hotel Dallas from Livia Ungur, who acts as co-writer and co-director on a film about her own experiences.

As the 1980s wound down, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu recognized that the people oppressed under the boot of his Communist tyranny were growing restless and itching for freedom. In a placating move, Ceaușescu allowed the state-run television station to air reruns of America’s wildly popular drama Dallas. The prime-time soap starred Larry Hagman as evil oil tycoon J.R. Ewing and Patrick Duffy as his much kinder brother, Bobby. So popular did the show become in Ceaușescu’s corner of the Eastern Bloc, an entrepreneurial individual modeled a building after the home of the Ewings’ fictitious Southfork Ranch and turned it into a hotel, where guests could temporarily pretend they were living in 1980s Dallas.

While it’s technically accurate to call Hotel Dallas a documentary, the term both oversells and undersells the film, a juxtaposition that offers an interesting opportunity for Ungur (and her co-creator/husband Sherng-Lee Huang), but one that hampers the work as a whole.

From the oversell perspective, Hotel Dallas offers less in the way of what a viewer might expect in a documentary set in this place and time. While the filmmakers properly frame the geopolitical landscape so the importance of the TV show to oppressed Romanians is clear, there isn’t a great amount of interest from the filmmakers in exploring it too deeply. There are some fine voiceover testimonies to be heard from people who lived there and then, and it’s clear the show was a godsend to those people (and perhaps something of a backfire on Ceaușescu), but they are only soundbites offering a sketch, not narratives offering a complete picture.

This is where calling it a documentary somewhat undersells the film, as it is far more artistically experimental than the average documentary, with parts of the film delving into everything from philosophical oppression to complete fantasy.

The highlights of this avant-doc portion of moviemaking are three scenes played out by Romanian child actors dressed as Pioneers—Romania’s Communist youth organization. In one scene, the kids reenact the death of Bobby Ewing as seen on TV (something Ungur admits to being traumatized by when she was a child). In another scene, Bobby Ewing is “reborn,” a moment taken from Dallas‘ now-infamous shower episode. In the third scene, and in keeping with themes of life and death, the children replay the Christmas execution of Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena—a chilling moment in stark monochrome, especially as performed by youngsters. There is also the chance to see an old Romanian oil company commercial starring Larry Hagman.

But the most fascinating artistic piece is the inclusion of Patrick Duffy himself throughout the entire film. He plays a character named Mr. Here (with a clever comic reason behind the name), but he channels his Bobby Ewing persona as if it were in a constant state of semi-consciousness. He is only seen onscreen once (in a recording studio scene that is slickly edited), and the rest of his “appearances” are voiceover, but from his POV. His purpose in the film is to bridge the gap between Hollywood fantasy and Romanian reality, along with bridging the time between Ungur’s modern-day existence and her Romanian youth. The pair actually travel back in time throughout the length of the film.

While some of the filmmaking is quite good when being judged on its own merits, the blending of documentary and drama becomes too cute by half. Even if every scene was good, the filmmakers don’t quite have the skills to pull off something this audacious. Using fantasy to tell the truth, or injecting the truth with fantasy to make a point, is tricky, and too often I found myself wondering what was real and what wasn’t, a question a viewer shouldn’t have when watching something that presents itself as factual. The filmmakers’ raw talent here is evident, but it’s unfocused. The facts are interesting, and the artistic choices are compelling, but the two aren’t meaty enough to work together very well.

Darius McCollum loves public transit. More specifically, he loves the trains that stream through the MTA system. The New York subway has been a lifelong obsession for him—a playground, a safe haven, and a place where new friends are never in short supply. It’s also a forbidden source of temptation, as Darius has been arrested more than 30 times for impersonating a train operator as well as various other transit employees. Considering his passion for the Transit Authority and his considerable knowledge of subway routes and procedures, one might wonder why Darius doesn’t apply for a position with the MTA rather than continue on as a criminal. As director Adam Irving details in Off the Rails, the reality of the situation is not so simple.

At the root of Darius’s compulsion is his Asperger’s syndrome. A defining characteristic of the disorder is an intense interest in one subject, and this has led Darius to study everything there is to know about the New York subway system. There is nothing malicious about his repeated transgressions. While most hijackings of public transit might spring from violent derangement or anarchistic intent, Darius’ actions rise from personal fulfillment and uncommon dutifulness. He follows the schedules, making every stop without deviation and carefully attending to any malfunctions with the necessary precautions.

Off the Rails takes viewers through the origins of this infatuation using home movies, cartoons, and testimonies from his mother as well as extensive interviews with the subject himself. We learn that Darius was bullied as a child and struggled to make friends. He found solace in the subway, where people didn’t judge him. Beloved by MTA employees for his enthusiasm, Darius became a kind of junior volunteer, helping out the operators with various tasks and eventually being taught how to run the train (an experience he compares to losing his virginity). But things turned sour when he was spotted behind the controls by police at the age of 15. Darius was arrested on the spot and soon became Public Enemy Number One to MTA executives for his repeated crimes, as posters bearing his image covered the subway walls. Even after growing to be of age, every application Darius sent to the corporation was rejected. Most of his life since that first arrest has found him wavering between jail time and virtual homelessness.

The documentary builds upon the context of Darius’s past to deliver a compelling study of his character and inner conflicts. We spend a lot of time with Darius, as the filmmakers capture his feelings with a compassionate camera, juxtaposing personal reflections with vibrant montages of train yards, bustling subway stations and brief scenes of everyday NYC street life. Listening to Darius, one gets the impression of a heartbreakingly sincere man—a man who sees the value in a few words of levity spoken to brighten another person’s day, who refers to Superman as a moral standard to live by, and who wrestles with delusions of his capacity for self-control. Darius may call himself “shy,” but he makes some fascinating insights, and his consistent presence really holds the film together.

Unfortunately, the audience isn’t allowed to draw its own conclusions on his behavior, as multiple therapists and Asperger’s specialists are brought on as talking heads. A certain degree of clinical observation is necessary to better understand Darius’ needs, but the impulse to frequently cut to the experts feels excessive. Rather than letting the implications of the subject’s words and actions stand by themselves (with perhaps some minor supporting commentary from those close to him), the filmmakers lean a little too heavily on the objective assessments to fill out their central characterization. As a result, Darius’ narrative comes off as slightly less intimate and more constructed.

About halfway through Off the Rails, the film begins to shift its focus from Darius to the legal system he finds himself ensnared in. Irving confronts the perpetual cycle of law-breaking and incarceration, taking aim at a courtroom that fails to acknowledge Darius’ unique psychological circumstances and a correctional department that doesn’t know what to do with him. This is where the sound bites from therapists and experts are most meaningful. The film campaigns for common sense solutions, calling upon the MTA to hire a man who would likely be their best employee and arguing for court rulings that wouldn’t serve to exacerbate the situation. A portrait of injustice begins to take shape and Darius is effectively painted as the victim of institutional neglect.

Pulling its unusual subject matter from the tongue-in-cheek headlines of local TV news, Off the Rails serves to humanize a person too often made out to be an eccentric curiosity. It’s a solid character study that admirably balances empowerment, hardship, empathy, and advocacy.

Regardless of industry—sports, music, journalism, etc.—a Hall of Fame is the last stop for anyone who has had an impact on, or is a legend within, their field. And what usually accompanies an induction into a Hall of Fame is a retrospective of that person’s life and/or career. Burlesque is no different, and director Rama Rau uses the Burlesque Hall of Fame induction weekend as the backdrop to her new documentary League of Exotique Dancers.

The film looks at the lives and careers of golden-age burlesque dancers, as recounted by the dancers themselves. The women, with sensational names like Gina Bon Bon, Kitten Natividad, and Lovey Goldmine, are as brash, sassy, and unfiltered as one would hope retired burlesque dancers would be. These “titans of tease” are also quite eager to capture one more moment in the spotlight, and they get their chance when asked to perform in front of a live audience as part of the induction weekend. The revisiting of their professional paths and personal perils within their vocation is positioned to offer a unique and thorough perspective on the history of burlesque dancing and the lives of its dancers.

In addition to the women’s tales, there are plenty of greater stories to be told in League of Exotique Dancers, including the history of burlesque (or at least its golden age), the impact—good or bad—the burlesque trade had on women (and not just the women featured here), and in the case of the dancer Toni Elling, how being an African-American burlesque dancer affected her in a racially-charged time in our country.

By the end of the film, none of these larger themes are ever explored. The perspectives of the dancers are certainly unique, but the thoroughness of their stories is the film’s ultimate weakness. This doesn’t happen in spite of the fact Rau has the shared experiences of these dancers in front of her, it happens because of it. Rather than pluck stories from each dancer’s life and use them to build any kind of greater narrative, Rau offers a hailstorm of experiences presented in such a staccato fashion that the film leaves the impression that each of the dancers filled out the same questionnaire and filmed their answers.

A few ladies talk about bad relationships. A few ladies talk about addiction. A few ladies talk about their current professions, and so on. It’s an attempt to tell history by way of list-making, and it fails to resonate. To its benefit, League of Exotique Dancers offers a terrific collection of vintage imagery, including still photos, old reels, etc., but these become nothing more than slideshow images accompanying a collection of verbal bullet points. There’s a story to be told about the golden age of burlesque. This film isn’t that story.

What begins as a search for a humourous news story turns into something far more insidious in David Farrier and Dylan Reeve’s Tickled, a documentary that’s living proof of how truth is always stranger than fiction. Farrier, a reporter in New Zealand, comes upon a website offering young men money to get tied up and tickled in front of a camera (something the site calls “Competitive Endurance Tickling” in the hopes of making it sound more professional). When he tries getting in touch with the site’s owners about doing a story, he gets a nasty reply mocking his sexual orientation followed by legal threats. The unexpected response only interests Farrier more, who recruits his friend Reeve to help investigate by flying to America in the hopes of finding out who creates these tickling videos. What they find is the stuff of conspiracy thrillers, except it involves an empire of online tickling fetish videos (like I said: truth is stranger than fiction).

Tickled is the kind of documentary that relies almost entirely on the twists and turns of its story, meaning that it’s best to go in knowing as little as possible about what Farrier and Reeve discover as they dig deeper into the rabbit hole they stumbled upon. It’s as if both directors know just how incredible their story is, preferring a straightforward, investigative approach that’s paced like a mystery/thriller. And while this approach is entertaining enough, its adherence to a more conventional narrative format winds up sidestepping some of the important questions and ideas that come up during the course of the investigation. There might be plenty to say here about the power of the internet, how for some it can be used more as a weapon than a tool, but it’s drowned out by Farrier and Reeve’s desire to package their film as something more accessible and familiar. Tickled tells a great, sensational story, one that will have people buzzing the same way that Catfish did back in 2010, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that Farrier and Reeve could have done a lot more with their story than simply tell it as is.

Deep in the wilderness of northern British Columbia beats the heart of the Tahltan people. They’re a First Nations tribe, surrounded by breathtaking snow-capped mountains and sharing space with various beasts they’ve called neighbors for thousands of years. The glorious expanse is seemingly timeless, largely unspoiled by deforestation and man-made structures. But as the Tahltan people struggle to retain their language and keep up native traditions in the 21^st century, a new threat to their land and way of life looms. Companies wanting to mine the area for its copper and gold set up shop, and their plans put the health of the land at stake.

Director Nettie Wild weaves a dazzling tapestry with KONELĪNE: our land beautiful. More formally experimental than the average documentary, the film doesn’t attack the environmental issues through any one perspective. In fact, there isn’t much of anything here that qualifies as an “attack” at all. The approach is far more meditative. A multitude of voices overlap, sharing feelings and personal histories while Wild showcases the region through expressive cinematography and editing. What this method produces is a lyrical ode to a bountiful and diverse landscape, along with the human beings who make it their home.

For all the beauty of KONELĪNE’s visuals, it’s the human subjects who make up the bedrock of the film. A series of vignette-like sequences are threaded throughout, giving the audience some quality time with the lifestyle and viewpoints of Tahltan natives and foreigners alike. Wild follows local fishermen as they cast their nets, a woman guiding hunters on horseback through steep mountain ranges, and a man with a dogsled who speaks with pride about running the same trails his ancestors followed. She speaks with a driller who chronicles the area’s geological history, and turns her camera on a pair of conflicted Tahltan mining employees who say that, in their impoverished state, they can’t afford to turn down the jobs.

This is only a sampling of the subjects that take the spotlight. The doc’s colorful tableau of experiences brings the viewer close to the realities of living in the region, and Wild appears to take pleasure in documenting the nitty-gritties of everyday work, showing a narrow focus on the work each person does with their hands. Horseshoes are fashioned and fastened to scuffed hooves, transition lines are painstakingly set up by a small crew, and fish are carefully cleaned at homemade butchering stations by the riverbank—all of this captured with a strong attention to detail. For fans of Werner Herzog, some of these scenes may feel reminiscent of his film Happy People: A Year in the Taiga in their fascination with the earthly qualities of independent living.

The film cannot be discussed without addressing its handling of the environment. The remote countryside is lensed with the same attention to detail as the people, but the land conveys the added weight of something formidable and pure. Wide shots capture postcard-ready vistas, and well-placed close-ups—such as one of hailstones falling on butterfly wings—express a measure of fragility. As one of the interviewees notes, it’s a land “with a personality.” Aided by a soundscape that mixes twinkling bells with wind gusts and rhythmic tribal drums, Wild demonstrates how that personality transfers to the spirit of the people who live off the land.

KONELĪNE: our land beautiful is a serenely delivered tribute to the Tahltan people and the earth they’re tied to. The themes here echo environmentalism, but the film moves more like a poem than a preachy assault on corporate greed. This is transportive, ethereal documentary filmmaking that is well-worth experiencing on the biggest screen possible.

“It’s a once-only chance to make the dead live again.” So states William Grimes, former book and restaurant critic, and current obituary writer, for the New York Times, in director Vanessa Gould’s marvelous documentary Obit. While the quote perfectly captures the essence of what real obituary writing is about, the film goes deeper than that, offering a lesson in history, a glimpse behind the scenes at the New York Times, a course in journalism, and a clinic in succinct writing.

It’s a tricky story to tell, as it combines a morbid subject with an activity—writing—that doesn’t necessarily make for compelling viewing. Gould understands this and rises to the challenge by approaching her subject from several angles. The backbone of the film is the linear thread: the anatomy of an obituary, from a fact-finding phone interview with a decedent’s widow first thing in the morning, to discussions on narrative approach in the afternoon, to filing the piece just under deadline in the evening.

Routinely stepping away from this so as not to get lost in function, Gould features a collection of deftly edited discussions with the NYT’s obit writing and editorial staff. Each discussion is fascinating, but none more so than those with Jeff Roth, the gloriously eccentric man in charge of “The Morgue,” where the newspaper’s history, and by extension the history of everyone who has ever been mentioned in the paper, is stored and catalogued. These discussions offer terrific anecdotal insight into the perception of obituaries and, more importantly, their history. This is where Gould’s film takes off.

A highlight reel of dazzling breadth, consisting of memories, news clips, and even video footage, spotlights one of the most interesting facets of obituaries: who gets one. Unlike your local paper, the NYT doesn’t publish everyone’s obit; someone has to have had a measurable impact to warrant one.

And it isn’t just celebrities, world leaders, or titans of industry who are considered to have had an impact. Included in this collection are the inventor of the Slinky, the pilot of the Enola Gay, an exotic dancer with ties to Jack Ruby, and the last surviving plaintiff from Brown v Board of Education, to name only a few. Every story is as amazing as the one before it and after, and if the anatomy of an obit is the backbone of the film, these highlight reels are the alluring soft parts.

With Obit, Vanessa Gould proves something I’ve said for years: pound-for-pound…or perhaps word-for-word is more apt…there is no better writing, and no better storytelling, in any national daily newspaper than there is in the obituary section. Obits are more than resumés of the deceased; obits are everyone’s last chance at life.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

Joe Berlinger has spent over 2 decades creating critically acclaimed documentaries, making him one of America’s leaders in documentary filmmaking. The Oscar-nominated director, responsible for films like Brother’s Keeper, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster and Crude, is most famous for his collaboration with Bruce Sinofsky on the Paradise Lost trilogy. Released between 1996 and 2011, the three films followed the witch hunt and unfair convictions of the “West Memphis 3,” with Part 3 culminating in their release from prison.

Berlinger returns to true crime for his latest film Whitey: The United States of America v. James J. Bulger. Berlinger focuses on James ‘Whitey’ Bulger, a crime lord in Boston responsible for a multitude of offenses including murder. Whitey escaped the FBI until his arrest in 2011. The documentary was filmed during Bulger’s trial last summer in Boston, and the film interviews family members of victims, defense attorneys, prosecutors, government officials, and plenty more to paint a picture of Whitey’s reign of terror over Boston.

But the film makes a shocking suggestion. The FBI claims that Whitey was an informant, but Berlinger lets Bulger’s defense team lay out their argument that Whitey never informed on anyone. In fact, he had different FBI agents in his pockets to make sure he wouldn’t be taken down by the authorities. It’s a dense, complex and messy tale, one that Berlinger effortlessly handles without losing viewers. Earlier this year at the Hot Docs Film Festival I sat down with Joe Berlinger to discuss Whitey. He talked about the different aesthetic challenges facing him on the film, his approach to documentary filmmaking, and Boston’s reaction to the film, among many other topics. Read on for the full interview, and be sure to check out Whitey: The United States of America v. James J. Bulger in theatres now.

For the Paradise Lost trilogy you and Bruce Sinofsky went into that case at the very beginning, watching everything unfold. Now, with Whitey, you’re coming into a case with decades of history behind it. What were the challenges facing you as you came in to start filming a story with such a long and notorious background?

It was a very challenging film to make in that respect. First of all, how do you educate the audience on this huge backstory? The trial was the only present tense element of the film, but because federal trials are not allowed to be photographed I had no access to the trial. I had to think, how do I make a film that’s not just all talking heads and archival footage? I used a leitmotif of people converging and driving, so I did a lot of introducing of cars to try to give the film a sense of motion. I used aerial shots to make the courthouse and the city of Boston a character. I tried to amp things up visually. Not that I reinvented the wheel with this, but as a cinema verité filmmaker I did recreations for the first time. All of those things were challenging, but the biggest challenge was where to find a balance. It was like Metallica: Some Kind of Monster or Paradise Lost 3. If you never heard of Metallica or the West Memphis 3, how do you make a film for those viewers? How do you make the film accessible to those who know nothing about the subject matter while making it rewarding for those who know a lot about it?

Those were the aesthetic challenges, but I think the fact that I was coming into the trial at the end of the story actually provided the film with its driving force. The point of my film was challenging the conventional wisdom. So much has been written about Bulger, and to me the trial and the making of the film was the opportunity to separate the man from the myth. It was the opportunity to start looking at what the truth behind the situation is. And the truth is very elusive. One of the themes is that we don’t know what the truth is. One of the big questions driving the film is whether or not he was an informant. All of the media to date, all the books that have been written, the movies about to be made with Johnny Depp and Matt Damon playing Whitey in different films, they all take as gospel that Bulger was an informant. That’s not necessarily the case. The film establishes there are some deeply troubling questions brewing about the idea that he was an informant. One of the aesthetic challenges was to use the first third of the film to present the conventional wisdom and then start picking it apart. Aesthetically and thematically it was a big opportunity to come in at the end of a 30 year history and say “The things you think you know about this guy are not necessarily the case.”

I was impressed by how smooth the presentation is because the material is quite dense.

It was the densest film I’ve done to date.

What challenges do you have in presenting so much information to the audience without getting them lost in the details?

That’s exactly it in a nutshell, finding that balance. The use of aerials was there to give the audience some moments to breathe. To me, music is always important to me in a film. I felt like the score drives the action forward and helps the audience absorb the information. I don’t think I’ve ever used music this aggressively in the film. Some people have complained about it. They ask why there’s wall to wall music in the film. For me it’s to help tell a story and help provide a kind of dramatic thrust forward for a film that could have been bogged down in pure interviews. At the end of the day this is a largely talking heads film, but you don’t necessarily feel that. It’s just certain aesthetic choices.

It’s interesting because when you establish the forward momentum I think it makes people more open to taking in the information. I had to keep my attention on it because I felt that if I turned away for several seconds I’d miss a major development.

I’ve jokingly said “Please don’t text during this movie.” You take two seconds away and you’re gonna be lost for the rest of the film.

You had a lot of limitations in this film. For instance, you said in an interview that you only had the prosecutors for one interview. How do you handle getting across your goals or vision for the film with these limitations? How do you adapt yourself to handle these roadblocks?

I’m pretty relentless in trying to get as many people to co-operate as possible. I won’t rest until I can get their perspective in the film, and if I can’t I have to figure out another way to get the information in there. I also think it’s important not to have a preconceived notion of what your film is prior to its completion. Films are a process of discovery. When [Bruce Sinofsky and I] first went down to do Paradise Lost, we thought we were making a film about guilty teenagers. That’s what all the press was about [at the time]. We thought we were making a film about disaffected youth who could have done something so terrible as to sacrifice three 8 year olds to the devil. Had we locked in to that perspective and tried to just focus on getting that, we would have missed the real story. And after about 3 months of being down there, things weren’t connecting for us. We came to the conclusion that these guys were innocent.

Going into Whitey I didn’t think I would be sympathetic towards Bulger, not that I’m sympathetic to him as a human being. He’s a cruel killer that deserves to be behind bars. I think some of his claims deserve to be looked into, but were swept under the rug at the trial. The local media treated it as a sideshow when it was essential to the case. Of course you come into a situation wanting to tell a story, but what’s helpful is keeping an open mind. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that I don’t try to lock into a preconceived notion of what the film I’m trying to make is because sometimes you miss the story.

Have you considered revisiting Whitey Bulger’s story? There’s obviously a wealth of material here to work with.

I don’t know. Look, I thought Paradise Lost was it and then I ended up making three films over 20 years. The cut for Sundance was 130 minutes, and people felt the density and the length combined made it too long, so we cut it back to its current 107 minute runtime. I just don’t know.

How has the reaction been from the city of Boston?
There were some people in the audience who found the film really powerful, but what’s curious to me was the reaction of a handful of journalists who have made a cottage industry in writing about Whitey being an informant. I think they were being intellectually dishonest in their reaction to my film. They were highly critical that I would have the nerve to even mention the fact that Whitey wasn’t an informant. It was very ironic that they were calling me intellectually dishonest for presenting it when I feel they’re being intellectually dishonest for criticizing it. First off, the film is called Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger, so if one of the major defense arguments is that he’s not an informant how can I leave it out of the story? Secondly, those writers who said it was irresponsible for me to even bring that argument up should have disclosed that they’ve made a lot of money and made their reputation on breaking the story that he’s an informant. I think there’s a little pot calling the kettle black here.

Truth is a major element in your film. It’s very unlikely that you’re going to find the complete truth about what happened with Whitey. You’re not going to get, say, direct results from your filmmaking. What are the results you’re trying to obtain here? The film deliberately raises more questions than it answers.

I’ve had the experience in my career where, with the Paradise Lost films, Bruce [Sinofsky] and I got really tangible results. That’s a rarity. You make films for a lot of different reasons: you want to move people, you want to tell a good story, you want an outcome. Paradise Lost is one end of the spectrum where you have tangible results and an impact in people’s lives. But somewhere down the line you also want to start a conversation or debate. I don’t think I’ll ever know the truth about the Bulger case. The government should not be in the business of deciding who should live or who should die. My goal in focusing on the criminal justice system is that we need to believe in our institutions of government. We need to shine a light on injustice wherever it is so it doesn’t happen again. My desire for the truth to come out in this case is to provoke a dialogue. I don’t think there are going to be tangible results like in Paradise Lost. I certainly hope people will see this and understand that, if the justice system is run by human beings, it’s extremely fallible. We need to have clarity and truthfulness in the situation because it’ll happen again.

Doug Block isn’t afraid to be open with his audiences. In 2005, Block made 51 Birch Street, a documentary about his parents’ complicated marriage. Years later he followed up with The Kids Grow Up, a documentary about his daughter moving off to college. Now, after making two films about his own family, Block turns the camera around to his own line of work.

112 Weddings is Doug Block’s look back on 9 couples he worked for over the last 20 years as a wedding videographer. Now, years later, Block has come back to interview them and see how they’re doing. Block uses the sober testimonies of his past clients, along with profiling an engaged couple about to get married, to explore the way marriage changes people over time.

HBO will air 112 Weddings on June 16th in the US, but Canadians are lucky enough to see the film in theatres when it opens on May 23. We talked to Doug Block about his film during Hot Docs earlier this year, be sure to check out our review and read the full interview below.

Can you get into the origin of this idea? When did you know you had a good concept for a documentary feature?
I knew it from the first wedding. I couldn’t believe they were paying me to do [wedding videos]. The prime concern of any documentary filmmaker is always access, and I was getting extraordinary access. Seeing an ordinary couple in one of the biggest days of their lives is fascinating, but to be paid well for doing it is like going to heaven. I was really taken with the weddings, and I was naturally curious about [their future]. I always thought it would make an interesting movie to come back years later and start asking them very nosy questions about their marriage.

What do you find different about going from autobiographical films to focusing on other people’s stories?
Well, you don’t have to face your cast every night [Laughs]. I don’t know, they have their own challenges. I love autobiographical films when they’re done well, and I work really hard to try and do mine well…

For quite a while I toyed with the notion of bringing my own marriage into it, but I just decided that I’d been there with the last two films. I thought “Do I really want to drag my wife into this?” She was perfectly happy to not be in it. The film works perfectly fine on its own.

What draws you to doing these intimate stories?
They just seem to fit a style I’m used to. I never deliberately said I’m going to make personal or autobiographical documentaries. I certainly didn’t plan on that, it just kind of evolved on my second film. There’s a certain intimacy and candor you get as a one person crew that really works [for me], and it sort of dictates the style. It’s not about getting the most beautiful images. The biggest benefit is that you can just shoot without fundraising. I get an idea for a film and I go do it.

You know there will be some level of evasiveness or deception from the couples you’re interviewing. Are you trying to break through that, or thinking of ways to make them open up to you?
With this kind of interview, particularly when the couples are framed in a two-shot, you can see their body language and facial expressions as the other’s talking. You get a kind of feel for their dynamic as a couple. What they don’t say is probably more revealing than what they say. Their reactions to each other was kind of my secret weapon, and I hate to phrase it that way because it sounds much more aggressive than I mean it to.

I was surprised at the level of candor. I try and create an atmosphere for the couples. Everything is for their comfort, to relax them and make it seem like it’s no big deal. Because my voice can be in the interview it can be much more conversational. Our dynamic, our back and forth is very much a part of it. I think it’s important to establish the fact that we had this kind of quick, surprisingly intense relationship for a very short period of time on a very important day of their lives.

Do you think your intense, brief relationship with the couples on their wedding day is why they were so open with you years later?
I think so. I think it was partly that and partly that they trusted me. I worked really hard in the editing to honour that trust.

So it didn’t take long to get everyone to agree?
I used the first 9 I asked. I came to realize that if I sat any of the couples down I could have had a really interesting story. I think if you dig down under every couple they’re bringing an epic story of their families into it. Each partner brings this long family history to the partnership. There are multitudes of stories within any marriage, it just depends on where you put your focus. I tried to put the focus on different aspects, in some cases how they met, how their parents reacted, or what children did to the equation.

Before you went out and started filming, did you have any set ideas or goals in mind about what you wanted to learn from the experience?
I tend to think in terms of what audiences will get out of it more than what I’ll get. I went into [this film] wanting to explore a subject like marriage. I figured if I had enough couples and a diversity of experiences it could create this mosaic-like view of marriage. I’m sort of captive to the specific experiences of these couples, so once I got the first couples I went for other couples that would make good contrasts. I ruled out certain couples because I thought they were too similar to another couple and their story.

How did you meet Heather and Sam, the couple about to get married?
I met them by accident. It occurred to me early on to get a new couple, because it would be important to see this perspective. I actually met them at a screening of a friend’s documentary. We learned Heather was getting married, I said “I’m doing this film,” and Heather’s friends quickly volunteered her.

I love all the couples in the film, but they’re amazing. Some of the things they have to say about marriage were so thoughtful in a way that only unmarried couples are. I think once you’re married and in the thick of it you stop talking about marriage and start living it, but they were really eager to talk. Their wedding was beautiful. To me, it was one of the greatest weddings I ever shot. I’m just stunned at what you get when you pick the right people. I think when you’re on the right track with an idea the documentary gods start smiling on you.

Throughout the film you like to show how time is the biggest factor when it comes to marriage.
Time has always been really important in all of my films. I love cutting back and forth through time, but I think you have to be judicious in how you use it so it doesn’t feel like a gimmick. I was looking at relationships over time, and [the film] went in some surprising directions during editing. It was kind of a surprise to look at marriage as an institution. I didn’t even realize I asked so many questions related to that, like the idea of what changes when you sign on the dotted line. I started to realize in editing that every single one of these issues would be the same if they were living together. It has nothing to do with marriage, it just has to do with time together. Be there long enough together and life is gonna happen, and there are bound to be tests. Parents are going to be ill, they’ll die, you’ll have kids, hopefully they’re healthy, maybe they’re not, but either way it’s testing your relationship. So what is different about being married? That was really interesting to explore. The whole notion of how, in the last 100 or 200 years at most, humans married out of this thing called love. It was always for security, economics, legal protection…Love had nothing to do with it, and that alone was interesting. Love is a hard thing to keep alive for a long period of time.

Your film seems to be resonating with people a lot. What have you noticed from audiences as you start to show the film?
It’s just an intriguing concept, so I’m not surprised. I thought it would be an audience pleaser because I thought the humour would translate. I’m thrilled it’s coming out theatrically in Canada. I think it’s a good date movie [Laughs]. It sounds cheesy, but I think it’s a really good movie for couples to see together.

What about the couples in your film? Have you shown it to them?
We showed it to as many of them as we could at one time. We had a little mini screening at HBO. It was nerve-wracking, but they really loved it and I was so relieved and thrilled. You never know how people will react, but they felt it was truthful and well-intentioned.

Have you thought about profiling more weddings?
I don’t know. I could go back. It would make a great ongoing series, which is something I’ve certainly considered and it may well happen, but I think there’s a big difference for me. I think a big reason why this films works the way it does is because of my relationship with the couples. It’s part of the dynamic. It gives the audience a short little window into [the marriages], but with the careful editing we did each one has a little dramatic arc to it. It feels like a complete, satisfying story. The trick was how to weave them all together so it wasn’t like one wedding to the next. You bring couples back, you bring up certain ideas to couples and they come and weigh in and then bring it all together at the end. The weaving together of these stories was the hard work.

For more info, visit the official website for 112 Weddings

First things first: Let’s congratulate the award winners at Hot Docs this year. The winner of Best Canadian Documentary went to Out of Mind, Out of Sight, a look at criminals with mental illness as they try to rehabilitate themselves in an asylum. Best International Documentary went to Waiting for August, a look at a Romanian teenager raising 6 siblings while her mother goes to work in a different city. The Audience Award has gone to The Backward Class. You can see all of the award winners here.

After seeing over 25 documentaries at the festival, I’m both exhausted and disappointed that I couldn’t see more. The most surprising part of the festival was how, for its size, there weren’t a lot of duds. As someone who approaches documentaries with hesitation, largely because of how the format can lead to uninspired filmmaking, I was surprised at how many documentaries found terrific subjects and innovative ways to tell their story. Below are my 10 personal favorites of the festival, along with a bonus pick. Information on distribution/availability is below as well, in case you’d like to find out if/when you can watch these great documentaries.

The Overnighters

By far my personal favorite of the new documentaries playing, The Overnighters is a roller coaster ride of a film. What starts out as a simple tale of a pastor trying to help out people in need spins out of control into something far more complex and devastating.

Availability: The film will be out in theaters this fall, presumably to give it an Oscar push. Be on the lookout for our interview with director Jesse Moss this fall.

Watchers of the Sky

Using the life of the man responsible for creating the word “genocide,” Watchers of the Sky is a moving look at people tirelessly fighting for justice, even though it’s unlikely they’ll succeed in their lifetime. Hopeful without being mawkish, wide-ranging without feeling spread thin, Watchers of the Sky is one of the year’s best documentaries.

Availability: In theaters this fall.

The Creator of the Jungle

The story of a true genius and artist, a man who simply wants to play with his toys and be left alone. In this case the man’s toys are an entire forest, and the results are jaw-dropping. A true definition of a festival gem, The Creator of the Jungle is well worth your time if you can see it.

Availability: Currently without distribution. Hopefully a distributor will snatch it up in due time, but if not be on the lookout for it on the festival circuit.

Read our interview with the director of The Creator of the Jungle HERE

No Lullaby

A mother and daughter’s attempt to break a cycle of abuse is simultaneously gut-wrenching and infuriating to watch. It’s the kind of story people need to see, no matter how hard it is to watch.

Availability: No North American distribution, but it will air on German TV next year.

Read our interview with the director of No Lullaby

Guidelines

A sort of more artistic take on Frederick Wiseman’s High School, Guidelines is a fascinating snapshot of a high school over one year. Through its striking cinematography, the film shows teenagers trying to find themselves between the freedom of youth outside of class and the strict rules imposed by their superiors in school.

Availability: There might be distribution in Canada through the National Film Board, but US distribution seems unlikely.

Actress

Robert Greene’s profile of his neighbor trying to get back into acting expands into something far more fascinating and complicated. Greene’s experimental approach, along with the haunting beauty of his film’s star, makes for a fascinating look into the artifice inherent in documentary filmmaking and our own lives.

Availability: Hopefully a release this year, but details are still unknown. Keep your eyes peeled for our interview with director Robert Greene and star Brandy Burre closer to the film’s release.

Whitey: The United States of America v. James J. Bulger

Documentary pro Joe Berlinger continues to prove why he’s one of the best in his field. Taking one of the most notorious criminals in US history, Berlinger makes a truly compelling argument against the status quo when it comes to Bulger’s sordid past. Fans of true crime stories shouldn’t miss this.

Availability: Expect a theatrical release this summer, and be sure to visit us closer to its release for our interview with director Joe Berlinger.

The Case Against 8

A look at the long, intense battle to declare California’s Proposition 8 as unconstitutional, The Case Against 8 is surprisingly involving despite its well-known outcome. Through its detailed look at the process of building an argument against Prop 8, The Case Against 8 shows how its central issue is more about human rights than politics.

Availability: A limited theatrical release in June, before airing on HBO in the US at the end of the month.

Joy of Man’s Desiring

I’ll admit, the film has slowly gone up in my estimation since seeing it. It’s a mostly wordless, but never boring look at human labour and the way people try to find happiness with dull, repetitive work.

Availability: Unknown at this time. Considering its brief length and 40+ minutes of nothing but operating machinery, don’t expect this to get a big release.

Private Violence

A well-done advocacy doc using two women, one an advocate for protecting abuse victims and the other a survivor of abuse, to highlight the complexities of trying to escape an abusive relationship. Anyone thinking a victim of domestic abuse can just walk away should watch this.

Availability: HBO has it, so expect a release sometime in the near future (fall/winter seems likely). Thankfully since HBO has this it should mean it’ll get plenty of exposure to the public.

Portrait of Jason

I included it as a bonus pick because it’s an older title, but it was overall the best documentary I saw at the festival. Both a fascinating look at one man’s life and a self-aware critique of documentary filmmaking, Portrait of Jason is challenging but essential viewing.

Availability: Milestone Films says they will be releasing the new, restored version of the film on DVD and Blu-Ray this year.

I Am Big Bird

I Am Big Bird is, not surprisingly, one of the more popular titles at the festival this year. Directors Dave LaMattina and Chad Walker tell the life story of Carroll Spinney, the man behind Big Bird and Oscar The Grouch. Spinney’s story is quite interesting, from his childhood goal to become a puppeteer to his hiring on Sesame Street and loving marriage to his second wife Deb. The problem is that LaMattina and Walker refuse to let Spinney’s story breathe for a single moment, instead relying on a barrage of maudlin tactics to choke tears out of viewers. This includes a loud, obnoxious, seemingly never-ending score, and incredibly manipulative editing choices.

LaMattina and Walker’s lack of confidence in their material is disappointing because Spinney’s story is definitely worthy of a documentary. Carroll and Deb’s love story is touching when they explain it, and when the film steps back it’s much better at getting an emotional response (a clip of Spinney, dressed up as Big Bird, singing “Bein’ Green” at Jim Henson’s memorial while choking back tears is the film’s only truly moving moment because the clip plays without any editing or interruptions). LaMattina and Walker’s heavy-handedness kills any chance of Spinney getting any kind of proper treatment, making I Am Big Bird a puff piece more than a documentary. The absurd praise thrown on Spinney and his family reaches nauseating heights by the end, with suggestions of their politeness helping another family move on from a tragic death along with contributing to Barack Obama’s election win in 2012 (!). Spinney’s life deserves more than this mawkish treatment.

Private Violence

HBO has good, effective documentaries down to a science by now, and Private Violence is yet another example of it. Director Cynthia Hill gives a vérité look into two lives: Kit Gruelle, a former victim of domestic abuse advocating for justice, and Deanna Walters, a mother trying to put away her abusive husband for good. Hill’s intent is to show the complexity with abusive relationships, and to explain why telling a victim of abuse to “Just leave” does more harm than good. Hill nails this aspect 100%, but the lack of any serious legal consequences for abuse is one of the most shocking parts of the film. Walters, who was driven across the country by her husband in his 18-wheeler and mercilessly beaten for days, is fighting to get him convicted for kidnapping and not for the abuse. Kidnapping is a felony and can get him put away for over 20 years; assault of a female is a misdemeanor and can only get him a maximum sentence of 150 days.

Hill cuts back and forth between Gruelle’s advocacy efforts and Walters’ attempt to move on, and the result is effective in its (somewhat) narrow focus. Walters’ case is used as a main symbol of the systemic problems of dealing with domestic abuse, while Gruelle’s visits of other victims paints a bigger picture of how widespread the issue is. Granted, Hill’s film will come across as a boilerplate social issue documentary to some, but her work is still powerful and informative. HBO’s involvement will most likely increase the film’s popularity, and as Private Violence shows this kind of subject matter needs to be looked at.

Mateo

Matthew Stoneman had dreams of becoming a pop star, until he went to prison for four years in 1997. Stoneman became obsessed with mariachi music and learned Spanish during his time in prison, coming out of jail reborn as a “Gringo Mariachi.” Matthew, who now goes by Mateo, repeatedly flies to Cuba so he can make a new album of songs inspired by the music scene in 1950s Havana.

Despite the four year journey director Aaron I. Naar took to make Mateo, there will be inevitable comparisons with Searching for Sugar Man. Both have an element of discovering a musical treasure (it’s not my kind of music, but Mateo actually is pretty good as a singer/songwriter), and that alone makes Mateo mostly enjoyable. Naar ends up surprisingly carving out a complex portrait of the white Spanish singer, whose life seems split into two halves. In Los Angeles he lives the solitary life of a hoarder, mostly going to different gigs so he can fund his trips to Havana. In Cuba, Mateo shows himself as quite the sociable person, even if his affinity for prostitutes can get very creepy.

Naar doesn’t come down on either side of his subject, a smart decision elevating Mateo beyond the “Gringo Mariachi” hook. Naar’s doc does flounder around the middle, as scenes of Mateo in Havana begin feeling repetitious, but a neat epilogue of sorts in Tokyo adds another fresh layer to the proceedings. Mateo won’t do much for an average viewer, but those interested in the subject matter will find themselves having a good time with it.

Portrait of Jason

Finally, a few words on Shirley Clarke’s landmark documentary Portrait of Jason. Hot Docs has a nice retrospective program, and this year they snagged the 35mm restoration of this 1967 classic. Over one night, Clarke filmed Jason Holliday, a charismatic hustler with plenty of stories to tell. From frame one, Portrait of Jason shows its awareness as a documentary with some layer of artifice. The image is out of focus, we hear the crew talking in the background, and Jason repeats the same line twice (“My name is Jason Holliday”) before admitting it’s a fake name.

Looking for “reality” in Portrait of Jason is a fool’s errand. Clarke and her crew, never seen but frequently heard, keep asking Jason to tell different stories (“Tell the one about the cop”). The film feels less like a profile or interview than people asking for Holliday’s greatest hits. Jason performs for the camera, delivering his stories with plenty of bravado and exaggerations. Attempts to dig deeper into his life show signs of a troubled childhood, but even stories of Jason getting abused by his father are told in the same overdramatic style.

Watching Portrait of Jason soon becomes an exhaustive, but necessary, experience. The questions will keep flying: How much of this is rehearsed? Is Jason telling the truth? Does he know what Clarke and her crew are going to do? That core question of what’s “real” never gets answered, making the film exist in a space of nothing but a series of subjective points of view. Clarke’s involvement of herself (many scenes end with the a black screen, while Clarke says to keep recording sound despite the reel ending) throws things into more chaos, as the expectation of her authorial hand providing some kind of grounding for the view goes out the window.

This approach will frustrate people (there were more than a few walkouts at the screening), but the questions Clarke’s film brings up are necessary reminders of the level of trust audiences give documentary filmmakers. The ethical qualities of Portrait of Jason continue to get blurred, with Clarke giving him more liquor as the night goes on and, by the final reel, openly attacking him to provoke some sort of response that fits their definition of something genuine (“Be honest, motherfucker, stop acting.”). There’s plenty to dissect in Portrait of Jason, something I don’t have the room for here (and better people have done excellent jobs already), but this is vital viewing for anyone who considers themselves a fan of documentaries.

The Creator of the Jungle is one of those documentaries that sounds unbelievable at first. Garrell, a middle aged man with a massive childlike imagination, spent his childhood playing in a forest by his home. As Garrell got older, his playfulness never went away. He kept building in the forest, creating dams, tunnels, labyrinths, towers, caves and many other things on a massive scale. With the help of a teenager and his camcorder, Garrell began to direct home movies where he played Tarzan. As Garrell’s creations began to attract people, the real world began closing in on his fantasy, making Garrell literally set fire to his work before starting all over again.

Director Jordi Morató tells Garrell’s astounding story over a 2+ decade period. Using Garrell’s home movies, Morató combines the incredible found footage with his own narration explaining his subjects’ story. The results are terrific, making Creator of the Jungle one of Hot Docs 2014’s true gems. It’s likely that Morató’s film will go unseen by many, but those who have the opportunity to watch it will be in for something truly delightful.

In advance of the film’s North American premiere, director Jordi Morató sat down with us to go over his arduous editing process, the benefit of a small story, how his own work reflects Garrell’s, and much more. The Creator of the Jungle will screen at Hot Docs this Saturday, May 3. You can find out more information about the film, including where to buy tickets, here.

How did you come upon Garrell’s work?

I found the forest because of a friend of mine. One day he was driving on the highway and saw the towers. He stopped and checked it out, and he thought he was in the middle of the Ewok forest from Star Wars. He told me about it, and I went there a few days later. I was completely fascinated by it.

Was there a point when you realized you could turn this into a feature?

I didn’t have a concrete idea at the beginning because I was more fascinated by the place. I started to film the forest just the sake of filming it. At first I thought it would be a reflexive movie, more contemplative, like an essay. Then I got to know Garrell and interview him. His own story was more fascinating than the forest. He told me all these stories about his 45 years of building it, and one day he told me about the old footage. I had been shooting for 9 months when he told me. I didn’t believe him at first, but then I saw the footage and was fascinated. It’s a crazy story, one 14 year old child with a 60 year old man doing films about Tarzan. I saw the footage and it changed my point of view completely. I knew at that moment I needed to tell the full 45 year story.

Garrell is really fighting to preserve his sense of childlike playfulness throughout the documentary. He’s like a kid wanting to be left alone with his toys. He just wants to play.

I think it’s one of the most important points, that Garrell is a 76-year-old child [Laughs]. I was fascinated because that kind of freedom is a dream for me. I wish I could be as free as Garrell, because Garrell spent all his life doing what he wants to do. When he was a child he went there [to play], and he kept doing it for the rest of his life. When he grew up, the situation got out of his hands completely. It started to be like a magic world for him. I think that’s important because when we grow up we try to forget that. It’s a basic thing, to be happy or to be yourself.

Tell me about the process of working with the tapes.

There was a lot of footage. It was difficult because it was mixed with different tapes. I had to reconstruct all the films because there’s a part on one tape, another part on another tape, along with a lot of other material. I spent 18 months just on editing. It was really difficult work, but when I started to rebuild the films I realized something really important happened when Garrell had problems with other people in the forest. When people started to kill some of his animals and vandalize his work, Garrell started to do films where Tarzan runs away from civilization. For me it was the most important thing [in the footage], because I could start to tell about his life with this material. I think that’s a kind of artistic expression from him, because instead of facing these people he let out his frustrations through the movies.

At what point going through these tapes did you realize Garrell was using these movies as a response to his real-life problems?

I don’t know, it took me a long time to realize this. At the beginning I only saw an old man playing Tarzan and it was really funny, but to find something more pure from this footage was difficult. I had to rebuild all the films before I realized I could find an artistic representation of Garrell’s life.

Your documentary has a narrow focus. It’s entirely in Garrell’s playground. You don’t know who Garrell is outside of this context. What made you decide to keep the film within that one place?

From the beginning I had the idea that I want to focus just on Garrell’s life in this forest. I was not interested in anything political, like what’s happening in the town related to the forest. I don’t want to use interviews of people from the town, his wife, etc. because I really want to portray this like a magic history. Kind of like a Hans Christian Andersen story. I wanted to focus on his own world.

I had shot some material outside the place. I have a lot of interviews of Garrell and other people, but I didn’t want to use that in the film. I think with a smaller story you can do the biggest things. I think I can tell everything with just his story. That’s a kind of stylistic choice, a more radical option.

The opening aerial shot over the forest is stunning. How did you do that?

It’s a crazy story. My brother and I went on a hot air balloon trip. The trip started in a city about 20 kilometres away from the city where Garrell’s forest is. The balloon just goes where the wind goes, you can’t choose the direction, and we ended up passing over the forest. It was a crazy coincidence, and I said that from this day I believe in God [Laughs]. The balloon is the best way to do a shot in the air because it’s so soft and peaceful.

Did you meet Aleix in the process? Did you consider involving him?

I used to talk to him a lot. I needed him to reconstruct all of the tapes. I only got the information from him. Garrell had the tapes.

How long did you spend filming?

I started four years ago, I was shooting for 2 years. It’s a good thing because in four years a lot can happen, so I had the opportunity to shoot everything. For this project it was very important to dedicate a lot of time to shooting and getting lots of material.

Did you have any filmmaking influences on this project?

I studied cinema for 7 years in Barcelona. The biggest influences are Werner Herzog and Johan van der Keuken. I like the kind of films where you can feel the director behind the camera. For me it’s very important to feel like you’re with the story.

Is that generally what you prefer? You want people to feel your presence behind the camera?

It depends on the project, maybe, but yeah. During the editing process I went crazy. I reached the point where I had three different ways to tell the story. I made three films and destroyed them, the same way Garrell did with his work. Eventually I thought “No, no, I have to tell Garrell’s story.” I think it’s impossible to tell this story without including [my own] point of view.

One of my favourite moments is when, after narrating over Garrell’s films for so long, you simply let one of his Tarzan movies play out uninterrupted.

I used Garrell’s footage to tell his story over 45 years, but at the same time I want people to enjoy the way Garrell made films. That’s why I decided to give the audience the opportunity to watch, because he was the director. He chose the locations, the shots, and gave instructions to Aleix. It was fantastic because they have knowledge about continuity, editing and using music. For me that’s real cinema. They don’t have any pretension to make big films, they’re just playing. That’s the essential thing about this footage. Only a child can help make these movies because [only] a child can play with Garrell.

No Lullaby is a difficult film to watch, but that’s precisely why Helen Simon made it. Simon tells the story of Tina Reuther, a woman who was repeatedly abused sexually by her father while growing up. Tina never spoke out about her suffering, keeping it hidden and, eventually, repressing any memories of it. Years later, Tina got married and had a daughter, Floh. After divorcing, Tina had her parents look after Floh while she worked. It wasn’t until Floh was in her 20s when she revealed that Tina’s father sexually abused her as well, and unlike her mother Floh took action. She took Tina’s father to court, but the trial was such a horrifying experience for Floh she committed suicide shortly afterward.

Helen Simon uses a narrow, artistic approach to convey Tina and Floh’s stories. Despite Floh being dead, Simon considers her and Tina to be the two protagonists of her film. Simon only interviews Tina and Johanna, a former lover of Floh’s. The interviews are crosscut between Simon narrating transcripts from the trial, with different artistic compositions and shots playing over the narration. The neutral, emotionless narration combined with these shots provide an intense emotional reaction from hearing Tina and Floh’s experiences.

Helen Simon was gracious enough to sit down and talk with us in advance of No Lullaby’s world premiere at Hot Docs. We get into her visual style for the film, the role society plays in creating these types of stories, the stigma of being a victim, the lengths she had to go to in order to make her film, the risks she faces in releasing it, and much more. No Lullaby premieres Wednesday, April 30th at Hot Docs. You can learn more about the film, and buy tickets, here.

This is your graduation film from Munich Film School. Were you ever expecting your graduation film to get into a festival like Hot Docs?
Of course not [Laughs]. To tell you the truth this is my first feature film ever. The two films I made before were all hard. I’ve always done hard films but they were always short films. This is my first long film, and I knew that the subject would be extremely hard to sell or to get people interested in, to get them to watch. I am just so amazed and thankful that Hot Docs took it and said “Okay, this is important.” Yeah, I didn’t expect it at all.

When you say you make hard films, do you mean in terms of subject matter?
Yeah.

What draws you to that?
I don’t know. I think everybody does what they’re able to do, what they have a feeling for. It’s strange that I’ve always had this feeling for subjects that no one else really wants to look at, and that’s what I want to do. I want to talk about things people don’t want to talk about. Have them look at things that are important to look at but they just don’t want to look at them.

How did you find out about Tina? How did you convince her to do the film?
The film took four years to make, it was a really long process. I knew from the beginning that I would have to find a protagonist that’s strong enough to go through the process with me. It took me about 8-10 months just to find Tina. I went researching all over Germany and got into all the different institutions and associations that do work with sexual abuse victims. I tried to find someone who would be able to do this very intimate story because that’s what I wanted [from the beginning]. I had seen a lot of media coverage on sexual abuse, and I never liked it because it was just the surface. It never really got into why these things happened.

I heard about her story through someone else who had met Floh (Tina’s daughter) and told me about this story. I knew it had to be this story because it wasn’t easy. You have a mother who, in some way actually, she could have stopped it, she didn’t stop it. She had her reasons, it’s understandable, but it’s a difficult, complicated situation and that’s what I wanted to do. I met up with her and she said “Yes” right away. I didn’t have to convince her. She had the ultimate motivation. She couldn’t help her daughter, she failed, which was extremely hard on her. And for her, making this film was sort of [her saying] “I can’t save her anymore, but maybe this story can help someone else.”

It’s such an extraordinary story. Did it get any media attention in Germany?
No, no. It was covered in Munich where the court was. There was one or two articles in the papers on the trial but no, not nationally. It’s because these things happen too often, this is not a story that’s…it happens a lot.

What really interested me were your artistic choices when it came to finding footage to go along with your reading of the trial’s transcripts. Could you go into your process on how you came up with the visual style for those scenes?
There were two aspects of the film that were extremely hard [to make decisions on]. That was the second one. Finding a visual aesthetic and images for that storyline of [reading text from] the protocols (Note: Protocols refers to the transcripts of the trial). It was a long process. We had five boxes full of protocols, and I had to make the story out of these, I don’t know how many pages we had. I knew from the beginning that I would need to find something that on the one side could carry the protocols but doesn’t go beyond them. It can’t be too much. I had to have the courage, and I say that specifically because these kinds of films lack the courage to just be experimental or do something that’s a little crazy, like you don’t know if it’s going to work. Like the shots of the forest, who knows? Is this gonna work for anybody? I had the feeling it might, it felt right for Floh, but I didn’t know. To do that with such a topic that’s so hard…it’s hard to find visuals for that.

What was also clear was that you have to have two different visual perspectives, one for Tina and one for Floh. I oriented myself by the psychological aspect of the two protagonists and how they experienced the abuse. I knew that, for Tina, the abuse was long gone and hidden somewhere in the back of her mind. There was no time in the interview where she was able to talk about what had happened or specifically say what her father did. I was glad because I didn’t want to get into that with her, but I knew that I would have to find visuals for that. When I talked to her and found out about her story it was clear it had to be, you know, tableaux. It had to be stills that just depict this idea of being locked in, but it’s so far away you can’t really reach it.

On the other hand you have Floh who was totally different. It was right at the surface with her. She carried it around with her. She wasn’t able to suppress it the way that her mother did. Those images had to be alive. And then I had to find images for the jury and about the situation. I decided to use seasons because that was one of the first questions from the protocols, what time of year [the abuse] happened more frequently. I thought that was so absurd. She was like 6 years old, who gives a shit? You know what I mean? And that’s just the way that they deal with these things. They don’t know how to deal with it either. And I just thought okay, let’s go with that and try to find different times of year.

How much of the film was an intuitive approach for you?
[Pause] All of it. [Laughs]

I had spent so much time with Tina and Floh, which is a little macabre because Floh had been dead and I just spent time with the protocols. It was just like spending time with her, and I felt so close with them that I had this idea about the shots of the forewst. I tried it out and hoped for the best.

There’s an implication in the documentary, not from you but from the situation itself, that one of the reasons why Tina might still be alive today is because she never spoke out. And by doing the right thing, Floh ends up paying with her life.
It’s an interesting observation, it never crossed my mind to think that way but I can understand how you can. And I thought maybe it’s true, in some sense it might just be true. Because all of this happens within a context and a structure. It’s a social structure that sort of defines how you’re able to make it in this life. I don’t believe it’s coming out of yourself. It’s just, you know, nature makes us strong or not it’s the social context in which we grow up in. and the way we live today it’s still dominant if you close up and you don’t talk about the things you’re not supposed to talk about and if you act like people want you to act you’ll survive better. I guess that is how it is today.

You only interview Tina and Johanna (Floh’s partner) in your film. Did you consider interviewing other people and getting different perspectives?
That was a deliberate decision. I wanted the absence of Floh to be felt. I don’t know if I succeeded in that, but it was important for me. It was a critical moment in the decision making because a lot of people told me “No you can’t do that, you got to interview more people that knew Floh so we can get a better image of her.” I understood that, I understand that people want that, but that’s not the reality. The reality is that she’s gone, and there’s a huge absence. That’s painful and hard, but I think it’s right. I didn’t go out [looking for other people to interview]. I wanted Johanna because it was Floh’s biggest love, and she was able to tell us things about Floh that Tina never knew. Apart from that I didn’t…no. Every perspective would have been an idea of something we don’t know, so let’s leave it at that.

Something your film touches on is a disturbing trend in society where people can’t accept victims. It seems it’s hard for people to grasp the concept that a person isn’t responsible for something terrible that happens to them. The verdict in the trial shows that, because it implies Floh was complicit with the abuse.
I think there are different aspects to the idea of being a victim that are screwed up. On the one hand you actually have the problem with people being victimized, and just being a victim. That was also an aspect that was very important for me when I chose the protagonist. I wanted someone that was strong and had a life that I could show in some sense, and Tina is a strong person that can talk very well. That was important too, that she could get to the point. This idea of being a victim is kind of easy to us, you know, “She’s the victim,” and that makes it easy because you don’t have to see eye to eye to that person. You don’t have to respect them.

On the other hand, if there’s a victim there’s always someone who’s done something bad. There’s always the other side. And I actually believe that, if we talk specifically about sexual abuse, it is a problem of patriarchy. I do believe it has a lot to do with that. And that’s very hard to take for a society because all of society is built upon that ideal. A topic like [sexual abuse] just rips into that and says “Wait, look at this. Look at how we are, how this system is treating children or treating women.” And this happens to men too, but that’s also patriarchy, there’s no difference. So we can’t deal with victims because they show us what’s going wrong with our system.

When I hear stories about someone getting hurt, I hear people say “Why didn’t they do anything?” in response, and it’s an absurd mentality. The idea that, when something is brought on to someone that brings great harm, their inaction is somehow wrong or makes them wrong.
It’s their fault that it’s happening to them, because they’ve acted somehow wrong and it’s not…well I guess it’s because we have a structural problem. It’s a structural problem and you can’t…That’s why it’s so hard to make a film about it, because on the one hand you really have to do an emotional film in order to get people interested and have them feel what’s happening. On the other hand you can’t make it too emotional because…

It gets exploitative or manipulative.
Yeah.

You’re talking about Tina’s story, but it’s also a symbol of legal and social injustices. How are you combining these two approaches? You’re clearly telling a personal story but you also want to make a grander statement.
That was one of the biggest problems for me. I wanted, at the end of the film, like a [title card] that says “so and so many children get abused every year” and make this social statement. I came into it with that political aspect, and at the end it was clear I couldn’t do that anymore. This is such a personal film. You can’t break it. That hurt a little, because I wanted it deeply, but it wouldn’t have helped the film. I’m so grateful that I was allowed to have the protocols of the trial. Without the trial the film would not have been the film. The trial makes it political, it gives it a social aspect that it never would have had with just the personal story.

Did you have any issues getting the protocols?
Yeah, it wasn’t easy. I had a lot of issues, to tell you the truth. The other aspect that was extremely hard was that I needed to get the signature from the perpetrator.

Really?
Yeah, from Tina’s father. He had to allow me to make the film. That’s why we had 4 years to make it. I spent half a year trying to convince him to give me a signature so I could make the movie. That was going through hell because I spent 3 or 4 times a week talking to him, and he tried to manipulate me. It was really hardcore, but he gave me the signature. I still don’t know why, but he gave it to me.

Could you go into some more detail about getting his signature?
To tell you the truth I don’t really know. I knew I needed it, and I also knew that I would never get it if I had a false state of mind. I would definitely need to respect him, and see him in the same way that I would see Tina, emotionally and open up to him. You have to do that, otherwise don’t try. That was very hard. It got interesting because we spent so much time with each other, and he was lying throughout. He still believes he’s innocent, that he never did anything, but he was emotionally very ill. He tried to manipulate me the way he manipulated others. It was this huge thing for me to stick to the facts, that no matter what he does you respect him and you treat him like anybody else, and you open up to him and you stay opened. I think that, at the end of the day, he was a very lonely person. He was very ill and very lonely, and having this long contact with someone for over half a year was actually the aspect that helped him to open up to me. I don’t think he actually wanted to help [Floh or Tina]. I think that he, in this sick way, wanted to help me, and that’s why he gave me his signature.

Are you still in contact with Tina?
I was there over Easter. We’re really in close contact, that’s very important to me. Not only am I extremely grateful to her, but she had the hardest job in this film. I just really loved her in a sense. It’s unbelievable how she’s able to be so honest today. I don’t know if I could ever be that honest.

You open the film with Floh’s suicide note. This interested me because, maybe I’m just used to other approaches to similar subject matter, but you immediately let the audience know the outcome of this story. I think other filmmakers would have approached it from a more chronological perspective. You’d see the story as it actually unfolded, and would have saved Floh’s suicide for the ending. What made you decide to open with that?
We had arguments on how to do that. For me it was…I had to get all the surface information out of the way because it’s about something different. It’s about really getting deep into it. I don’t want to build up to it. I want the audience to know right at the beginning what this is about. To understand that the fall is a big one. The protagonist is dead, who we’re talking about is dead, and that makes a point right at the beginning. Once that gets out of the way, we have the freedom to get into why it happens because that’s what I wanted to tell. For me it was extremely important for people to understand the complex structures that are built around things like sexual abuse in the family system. It’s extremely complex.

Has she seen the film?
No. She can’t.

There are moments where she’s going through photo albums. She agreed to do the film, but how did you feel about making her dive into these traumatic memories?
Before I started the film, I did some schooling on how to be with deeply traumatized people. I tried to prepare myself for these interviews. What was clear was that [the interviews] always had to be the same time of day, always the same length, and it had to have a very safe environment for her. I tried to make that happen, to make it safe as possible. We always did 1, 1.5 hours every time. Every time it was like a bomb exploding, and we got really fast, really deep, and that surprised me as well. I think what was important that I didn’t hold back. I felt like she doesn’t want to, she can’t, so I’m not going to. I’m going to go in there with her. I’m going to dive in there with her even if I’m shocked and a little scared because I don’t really know how to handle it. I’m responsible. She’s being re-traumatized every time we are having an interview. Definitely. I am responsible. This is what she wants, she’s going there and I’m going there with her. We stuck through it together.

Have you heard anything from Tina’s family?
The family threatened me before I made the film that they would sue me afterwards. She has a brother, and he threatened to sue me. This is our [world premiere] here in Canada so I don’t think anything’s going to happen, but our next screening will be in Munich which is their hometown.

Are you nervous?
Yeah. I’ll see what will happen then.

Do you have anything planned for the future?
I’m already working on a new film. It’s about child trafficking. I love [making hard films], I need it or otherwise I don’t make a film. I need something that I really believe in and I feel has to be made. I’ve been researching it for the last 6 months. We now have a TV station coming into the project, and I’m going to be doing a film on a home for children that, for some reason or another, got out of child trafficking in Europe. They’ve been prostituted and terrible, terrible things have happened. They land in a home somewhere in Bulgaria where no one gives a shit. The State pushes them aside, they’re not allowed to go back to their families, they don’t have a future and no one cares. That’s where I’m going, and I’m going to make a film about them.

You bookend the film with two shots: It opens with the camera moving toward a house, and it closes with the camera moving away from it. It gives off the feeling that this is anybody’s story.
My intent was exactly that. This is what happens, maybe happens, behind your neighbour’s house. Behind the walls of that house.

Actress

Robert Greene finds inspiration for his latest documentary in his next-door neighbour Brandy Burre. Burre was an up and coming actress, known mostly for a recurring role on HBO’s The Wire, but an unexpected pregnancy made her decide to put a hiatus on acting in order to raise her child. Now, years later and raising two kids with her long-term boyfriend Tim, Burre tries to get back into acting.

Greene focuses on Burre’s domesticated life before a revelation changes the film significantly. Burre gives Greene a surprising amount of access into her life, and Greene uses the opportunity to explore the reality of what he’s viewing. It’s hard to tell if Burre is showing her true self at times, or if she’s performing for the camera. Greene blurs the lines between these distinctions even further by filming scenes that are clearly set up and giving her a proper credit (the film’s title card says “Brandy Burre is ACTRESS”).

The results may not always live up to the intrigue of Greene’s ideas, but Actress is mesmerizing the whole way through. Most of this is because of Burre who, despite her actions, makes for a likable and relatable subject. Greene brings up plenty of interesting ideas through his direction, and his filming of Burre in different environments (especially when she’s entertaining visitors in her home) makes a strong point about the different levels of performance people do in their day-to-day lives. It’s exciting to see a documentary filmmaker take these kinds of risks in their work, making Actress one of the more admirable docs I’ve seen at the festival this year.

The Joe Show

It’s astounding that no one has made a documentary about Joe Arpaio until now. For those not in the know, Arpaio is the sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona, and is well-known for his publicity stunts. These include chain gangs, prisoners wearing pink underwear, “tent cities” for inmates, and more bizarre actions the media loves to lap up.

Arpaio’s narcissistic, hungry for the camera personality allowed director Randy Murray access to the sheriff’s personal and professional life, a decision that Arpaio regrets now. After a brief (but still too long) period portraying Arpaio in a positive light, Murray begins showing the truth. Arpaio is a monstrous, power-abusing figure of authority, his atrocities including arresting and stalking critics, ignoring hundreds of sex crimes and more than several suspicious deaths.

There is a fundamental need for a documentary like Murray’s, as Arpaio’s media sideshows have successfully served as distractions from his horrific actions as sheriff, but The Joe Show has its priorities wrong. Murray’s attempts to explore how fame corrupts people feels half-baked, and is nowhere near as interesting as learning about Arpaio’s abuses of power. The doc’s worst offense comes when the focus on people killed by Maricopa County police officers is reduced to a flashy montage, pushed out of the way to focus on Arpaio’s successful run for sheriff in 2012 (Murray tries to create tension out of the election results, a baffling decision considering it happened two years ago and the results are widely known).

Murray’s fondness for Arpaio (he said that Joe became “a friend” while shooting) shines through even to the end, as his victory in the 2012 election is scored with “Back in the Saddle Again.” But the playful, wink-nudge tone of this sequence feels strange considering it surrounds someone whose behaviour shares similarities with dictators. The Joe Show does do a decent job tearing apart Joe Arpaio’s record, but it’s not the dressing down he deserves.

E-Team

The E-Team is a group of Human Rights Watch workers traveling the world to investigate claims of human rights abuse. This usually means entering war zones, and filmmakers Ross Kaufman & Katy Chevigny take their cameras with two pairs of E-team workers: Anna & Ole, a married couple investigating Syria’s attacks on civilians; and Fred & Peter, who travel to Libya to investigate claims of abuse from Gadaffi’s army and the rebels. Kaufman and Chevigny’s work on the project is admirable, as they dive right in with the E-Team and join them in the two war-torn areas. An early sequence where Anna and Ole make a run for Syria’s border shows just how risky it is for everyone.

But admiration for the filmmakers, and even more admiration for the doc’s subjects, is the only thing to take from E-Team. Kaufman and Chevigny’s work is surprisingly unenlightening, and despite their time with the four E-Team members very little is learned. The one exception to this is Fred, the “father” of the E-Team, whose explanation of his work in Kosovo (including facing down Milosevic in court) shows how important the team’s work is. There is little else worth mentioning or recommending here, as Kaufman/Chevigny focus on grisly images and mourners instead of delving deeper into their subject matter. It all feels a little too pat in its portrayal, making most of E-Team feel like an overextended news segment. There’s a good documentary to be made about the work these people do; E-Team isn’t it.

The Last Season

The Last Season, an engrossing, layered documentary by Berkeley, CA filmmaker Sara Dosa, captures the poetic beauty of a father-son relationship between two damaged, former soldiers–Roger, an American sniper who fought in Vietnam and Kouy, a Cambodian who resisted the Khmer Rouge–who forged their loving bond while hunting for rare mushrooms in Oregon. Stories as unique as theirs are few and far between.

Every fall in Chemult, Oregon (population 300-ish), a group of seasonal migrant workers, most of them Southeast Asian, set up shop and scour the surrounding woods for matsutake mushrooms, one of earth’s rarest gifts from the soil. The Japanese cherish the fist-sized fungi and used to pay hundreds of dollars per pound for the stuff in the ’90s, though the price has dropped to around $46 on the high end these days. Still, matsutake hunting is a decidedly lucrative endeavor. Each mushroom season, the hunters erect a tent community called “Mushroom City”, which is where Roger and Kouy met.

The two shared with each other the war stories that haunt them daily–Kouy is accustomed to sleeping with a rifle and Roger has been known to block out the memories of his lost friends with buckets of whisky, a temporarily dormant habit that scares his good-hearted wife Theresa to death. The ex-soldiers gravitated toward each other out of shared empathy for certain, but more remarkably they illuminated a path of healing for each other they’d have never found had it not been for those magical mushrooms. They grew so close, in fact, that Kouy humbly asked Roger and Theresa to be his adopted parents, a request the couple warmly accepted.

We only hear of these formative events through stories told by the three subjects, but what Dosa does capture on camera is a loving family dynamic that breaks ethnological norms in the most heart-warming way. Hunting for mushrooms is a fitting metaphor for Kouy and Roger’s long journey to find each other, and The Last Season is as precious as a basketful of matsutakes.

Self(less) Portrait

In Self(less) Portrait, a flat, tedious documentary, 50 people participate in an experiment: They’re each sat down on a stool in front of a plain white background and asked to share the unbridled truth about their darkest, most personal life experiences. The film, a Quebecois production by Danic Champoux, is a collage of stories stripped of all context, jumping in and out of the myriad interviews whenever Champoux feels a cut would be most artistic or enticing. It’s a simple concept that has the potential to be fascinating, but in the film’s desperate, distracting attempts to be mysterious and unnecessarily cryptic, it loses its teeth.

The stories shared are mostly interesting. In a fascinating confession, a transgender woman explains her inner struggle with the fact that, in a way, she’s left her daughter fatherless. One man, a professional wrestler who sits in the stool in full gear, face paint and all, gushes tearfully about his passion for entertaining his fans, some of whom consider his performances the highlight of their year. All manner of ugly human issues are covered–rape, spousal abuse, suicide, gender inequality–and the stories themselves are not what make the film such a dud.

The major issue here is Champoux insistence on littering the film with ridiculous visual effects like placing random shadows or lens flares on the subjects’ bodies. There are pretentious interludes scattered throughout consisting of indecipherable images of light barely penetrating a dark abyss that only serve to distract from the confessionals rather than frame them symbolically, as was clearly intended. Even more infuriating is the score, a series of long, low rumbles meant to underline the blackness or suspense of the stories.

The film is sorely in need of Errol Morris’ Interrotron system, which allows interviewees to look into the eyes of the interviewer and the camera lens simultaneously, to striking effect. As the film wears on, the desire to lock eyes with the subjects as they share their hyper-personal anecdotes becomes almost unbearable. Their sat right in front of us, and yet the lack of eye contact and Champoux’s array of audio-visual adornments makes them feel miles away.

Absences

As director Carole Laganière’s mother begins to lose her memory from Alzheimer’s, she turns her camera to three other people suffering a major loss: a Croatian immigrant revisits her home country to find her estranged mother, an American author discovers an extended family his father kept hidden from him, and a French-Canadian woman searches for her missing sister in Toronto.

Laganière cuts between these four lives (including her mother’s) to explore the psychological impact of loss. As the author explains at one point, the feeling of loss transforms into a quest for something to fill the void. Unfortunately, Laganière fails to adequately communicate this idea through her filmmaking. Absences is mostly made up of bland observational footage of her subjects’ lives, making little room for exploring such a rich topic. The missing sister branch of the film is the most interesting, and could make for an interesting documentary feature on its own.

Guidelines

Jean-François Caissy clearly has Frederick Wiseman’s High School in mind with his latest film. Following a rural Quebec high school over a school year, Guidelines is like an artsy, more abstract version of Wiseman’s landmark documentary. Delinquent students are filmed in a dim office as authority figures in the school explain different rules the students must follow in order to avoid punishment (these meetings are referred to as “interventions”).

Caissy and cinematographer Nicolas Canniccioni film almost entirely in fixed, well-composed shots in the school and its surrounding areas. A brief interlude of teens playing around outside of school in the forest and lake highlight the conflict between the kids’ casual, fun lives and the strict rigidity of school. This effect is achieved through framing alone; scenes at the school look boxed-in, while the outdoors are filmed in long shots. Guidelines prefers to let viewers come to their own conclusions about what Caissy shows, a choice that ends up paying off nicely. It’s an engrossing look at teenage life backed up by terrific visuals.

The Engineer

Israel Ticas is the only criminologist in El Salvador, spending almost all of his time digging up dead bodies in unmarked graves across the country. A recent truce between El Salvador’s two largest gangs has seen murder rates plummet, but police and citizens describe this as a “smokescreen”; the number of disappearances keep rising, meaning the gangs haven’t changed their operations aside from covering their tracks.

The Engineer follows Ticas around as he travels from one site to another, discovering mutilated corpses and trying to punish those responsible. Ticas is a likeable subject, even if his obsession with death can get a little disturbing (his office walls are plastered with grisly crime scene photos), and his comments on how he deals with such a life-threatening job are fascinating to hear.

Directors Mathew Charles and Juan Passarelli take an unflinching look at Ticas’ work, but their use of vibrant montages makes for plenty of jarring tonal shifts. Case in point: After Ticas discovers a decapitated 8-year old in a well, a montage of city life set to upbeat music immediately follows. Charles and Passarelli might have used these sequences to underscore how natural death and violence is to people in El Salvador, but no matter what the intent is, it makes for awkward viewing. Other than that, The Engineer is an interesting look at Ticas and his grisly line of work.

In the small town of Chadron, Nebraska, math professor Steven Haataja vanished without a trace shortly after starting his new job. It took several months to find his body, and the discovery only brought on more questions. Haataja was found tied up to a tree, burnt beyond recognition, and there was no evidence of anyone else’s involvement. The case remains open to this day, with some believing Haataja either killed himself or was brutally murdered.

Chadron resident and writer Poe Ballantine was in the middle of working on his memoir “Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere” when filmmaker Dave Jannetta contacted him. Jannetta was interested in Poe’s memoir along with the Haataja case, and after discussions Jannetta came to Chadron to film a documentary surrounding the mystery. Ballentine weaves his own life story, Haataja’s death and the unique qualities of Chadron together in his memoir, and Jannetta uses a similar approach. Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere (the doc adopts the same title as the book) is not merely a crime story. Jannetta focuses on Ballantine’s own life, his family, and how he came to Chadron, while also profiling Chadron’s people and history.

In anticipation for the film’s world première at Hot Docs, Mr. Jannetta and Mr. Ballentine were gracious enough to answer some questions through e-mail about the film. The two men have very different personalities, but both share a mutual passion for the topics covered in their respective works. We talk about the difference between fiction and non-fiction filmmaking, the relationship between the book and film, facing obstacles while filming, what they hope the two works will achieve, and much more. Read below for the full interview.

Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere will have its world première at Hot Docs in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. You can find more information on the film here, and to find out more information about the festival (including all films playing, along with when to see them) go to www.hotdocs.ca.

Poe, your memoir was published last summer, and now Dave Jannetta’s documentary is premiering at Hot Docs. How do you feel about getting to see yourself on the big screen?

Poe Ballentine: I don’t really enjoy looking at or listening to myself, but Dave went to a lot of trouble so that I didn’t look like an idiot, so I’m going to try and be as cooperative as possible. I’m excited about the film because so much work went into it, and it’s fun to watch.

And Dave, how do you feel about getting to premiere your film at such a big event?

Dave Jannetta: After Love and Terror was accepted to Hot Docs I said to a friend, “It feels nice to be the pretty, popular cheerleader for a minute.” He thought captain of the football team was apt, but you get the idea. It’s difficult to get people to give a damn about anything and Hot Docs has definitely greased those skids. Making films independently is a slog and you can end up feeling like you’re creating in a vacuum. It’s hard to get solid, objective feedback. If festivals reject you they send form emails telling you it’s not your fault, there were just too many great films this year and “we’re sorry but we can’t tell you why yours wasn’t one of them.” You get really good at accepting rejection. I’m not positive what to expect from Hot Docs but they’ve been incredibly straightforward, helpful, and kind – exactly what a filmmaker hopes for. So I’m excited and thankful to be part of such a great festival.

[To Poe Ballantine] How did you feel when Dave Jannetta approached you about making the documentary? What made you decide to go along with it?

PB: I’m flattered anytime someone takes interest in my work, but because I work alone I thought the odds were pretty long of anything panning out between us. But he turned out to be everything you’d want in a documentarian, sharp-eyed, whip smart, funny, hardworking, detail-oriented, eager to learn, and you never knew what he might do next. I’d turn around and there he’d be in a Highland kilt, a bagpipe in his hands.

In the film, some of the people you write about in your memoir are able to speak for themselves, including your family. How did your wife and son feel about participating in the documentary? Did you learn anything new from Mr. Jannetta’s interviews with your family and the citizens of Chadron?

PB: My son is thrilled to be in a movie, my wife not so much. However I think she’s secretly pleased to be getting her beautiful mug on the big screen. Whenever you get a camera on someone and ask them poignant questions something juicy [is] bound to spill. Loren Zimmerman, the ex-LAPD homicide detective who unofficially took over the investigation, admitting that he was the most likely suspect in the murder of Steven Haataja was particularly enlightening [I thought].

[To Dave Jannetta] You’ve already written and directed one feature. Did you deliberately decide to go for non-fiction with your next film, and how would you compare the two types of filmmaking?

DJ: I often tell people that Rachel & Diana (my first feature) was my film school. It’s not a perfect film but I learned a ton. After Rachel and Diana I continued to work on narrative screenplays and was trying to make a living as a freelance filmmaker. That’s when I began thinking about possible documentary projects because it seemed to me they’d be less resource intensive but equally challenging. Then I came across a short description of Poe’s then in progress memoir [of] Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere.

I was most surprised at how the process of making narrative films vs. documentaries overlap and where they diverge. I’m not an avant-garde filmmaker, so at the most basic level I’m just trying to tell a really interesting story. It’s always the driving force. With a narrative film you basically get everything in place before you begin: screenplay, actors, locations, schedules, crew, etc. You should really be able to envision the final film from day one. Conversely, while making a documentary a lot of those things come in the reverse order. You have a vision of the finished project in mind but the capricious nature of the process doesn’t lend itself to rigidity.

Your film settles into a kind of rhythm as it goes along, going back and forth between the Haataja mystery and profiling Chadron itself. Was it difficult to develop this kind of structure during production? Did you ever have trouble in deciding what to focus on, or where it would fit within your film while editing?

DJ: Oh man – it was arduous to put it mildly. There were always three elements that were going to form the foundation of the film: Poe’s story, Steven Haataja’s story, and the story of Chadron itself. I was very familiar with Poe’s work before approaching him about doing [the film]. He spoke my language and I figured that what I knew of his life could turn into an interesting film no matter what. When we began shooting it was well before [Poe’s memoir] was published, so all I knew about it was a short description I’d read. For me, the unsolved death was intriguing but I had no clue where it would lead or how fulfilling that story thread would be. But I did know that I did not want the film to be an archetypal “true crime” documentary or procedural. And as soon as I arrived in Chadron on a scout trip and began meeting and talking to people I believed that if I could effectively capture a snapshot of what the town was like, people would find it interesting.

Poe Ballentine believes Steven Haataja was murdered, but your film gives time to different theories surrounding his death. How did your opinion on Mr. Haataja’s death develop while you were making your film, and where do you personally stand on the matter now?

DJ: It was like a pendulum. There isn’t a great deal of objective information surrounding the Haataja case so a good portion of what I was hearing was hearsay or not necessarily related to the death. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t have value. It was strange because I’d often talk with three or four people in a row who had similar opinions and it would really start to make sense. But I’d go back and look over the evidence or talk to three more people with divergent viewpoints and my opinion would flip. It’s really difficult not to suffer from confirmation bias – to have a preconceived conclusion and place extra emphasis on the evidence that supports it – but I think it’s imperative to keep an open mind to all possibilities. Occam’s razor can be helpful, but the assumptions start piling up pretty quickly and one hypotheses ends up as riddled with holes as the next. While I wouldn’t go on record saying I think it was a cold blooded murder I will say that I think, at the very least, someone else was involved or knows what happened. I realize that’s a cop-out and the fact that I couldn’t get a definitive answer is (in my opinion) a failing of the film. But life’s endings are rarely served neat and I think an ambiguous conclusion is fitting. At least for now. Steven’s story is incomplete – it’s built upon first and second hand accounts, conjecture, rumor, and a few solid pieces of evidence. But I guess that’s how history is usually written.

Since the documentary isn’t exactly an adaptation, how would the two of you characterize the relationship between the film and memoir?

DJ: I’d say the film and the memoir parallel each other and that I hope the experience of one enriches the other.

PB: Even though it has a lot of fancy writing in it, the core of my memoir is journalistic. Dave is more interested in faces, landscape, local color, and letting people talk. We’ve both examined the way in which reality is filtered and altered by whoever’s turn it is to tell a story, which explains why collaborative accounts such as news and even history itself so often miss the mark. Both of our projects are grounded in the central mystery and the portraiture of a small town reacting to a spectacularly tragic event, but I think Dave is more stylistically content with an open ending. While text gives you more room for laughs, asides, and waxing philosophical, film is better at straight exposition. We also attempt to retrace Steven’s freezing moonlit journey across private ranch land to the place where he was found, and I think the film does a better job than my book of showing how prohibitive and unlikely that venture was, at least on foot. Both of our examinations were intended to invite more information in the hopeful solution of this case. In this and many other ways I think our two projects make good companions.

Mr. Haataja’s family have publicly expressed their dislike with your documentary along with Poe Ballantine’s memoir. Since you didn’t have access to the people who knew Steven Haataja best, my question is how you, as a documentary filmmaker, try to compensate for these kinds of restrictions. How do you adapt yourself to give a fair portrayal to your subject(s)/subject matter, even if you aren’t able to include some key perspectives?

DJ: Perspective is the key word in your question. I did talk with Steven’s family early on, and their discontent with the book and film are articulated on various blogs and message boards. I had to do a lot of soul searching and tried to keep up a dialogue with them throughout the process but it’s not much fun to be reviled. Who should be able to tell Steven’s story? Is it exploitative for people who didn’t know him to undertake projects that outline some of the details of his life and death? It’s a moral grey area and I’ve had emails from people who knew Steven both excoriating me and thanking me. But that’s where the most interesting stories live. Black and white is too easy, it’s boring. It’s when the questions you’re asking are in shades of grey that you’ll tend to find the most value. All that being said – without Steven’s family on board [and for budgetary reasons] I made the decision fairly early on to restrict the perspective to the town of Chadron. Even though Steven only lived in town a short time before he disappeared I feel like I was able to find people who had an understanding of him as a person and who could communicate the essence of who he was. The tragedy of Steven is only one element of the film. If it were entirely about Steven and his death I do think [it would be exploitative].

I will say, however, that the process was made much more difficult after an edict from [Steven’s former employer] forbid their employees to discuss the case with me. This was after a meeting in which their director of communications seemed amenable to the idea of the documentary. I’ve even heard rumors that they now put something in their contracts for new employees saying they can’t discuss the Haataja case. What are they trying to hide?

The memoir wasn’t actually finished while filming took place (It was published in the summer of 2013, and you can buy a copy here). Did the filming process influence the writing process, and vice versa?

DJ: When I first arrived in Chadron, Poe had an umpteenth draft of the book that was basically shelved. He hadn’t been able to get it right, was worried about how the town would react, and was almost relieved that it was resting quietly in the shadows. He even remarked to me at one point that he hoped it could be published posthumously. I decided that I wouldn’t read a draft right away because I wanted the film to be its own entity. But I was interacting with [Poe] daily while we were filming so his ideas were seeping into the film whether I liked it or not. As I started conducting interviews he went back to his book and started [revising]. After about a year I read a draft of the book and we were able to talk more clearly. On subsequent trips we worked hard, watched movies, discussed books, ate homemade seafood étouffée, drank, and above all talked about stories. And these things, more than the book itself, impacted the actual production and editing process.

PB: Dave’s film gave me a chance to review every aspect of the case from another perspective, so it’s a much more thorough, balanced, and accurate treatment than it would’ve been without his intervention. I also started carrying around a megaphone and calling everyone “babe.”

What do the both of you hope Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere will achieve, and are you concerned with how Chadron will react?

DJ: The case of Steven Haataja’s death is still unsolved, and I think there’s more to the story. I hope that the combination of the film and book are able to knock something loose and lead to a resolution. This might not happen right away but the film will be around for people to examine. Maybe in 50 years when I’m sucking pureed brussels sprouts through a straw in a convalescent hospital someone will finally be able to put all the pieces together and figure it out.

As one of the interviewees says in the film, “If it had been a fucking football coach who disappeared they would’ve called in the National Guard.” I’ll add that if Steven was an attractive blonde female or privileged white male they wouldn’t have rested until they had all the answers. Part of the tragedy is that Steven was a quiet, gentle, cerebral wallflower. This story wouldn’t have been told if they’d found him right away. But I don’t blame Chadron as much as contemporary America. I loved it out there, made some great friends, and hope to go back often. I don’t think I portrayed anything or anyone unfairly but that doesn’t mean I won’t piss some people off. So yeah, I’m a bit concerned. But as Poe wrote to me in an early email, “It’s quite possible, since Haataja was burned alive, that there is still a killer at large, and dozens of citizens, some dangerous, will not be happy to see their accounts presented or their deeds come to light, and so the risk in this is not only artistic, but that’s of course the very quality that makes it fascinating.”

I also hope the film does its part to nudge Poe from the literary shadows. And I’d obviously like audiences to see and enjoy the documentary, to spend a little bit of time pondering the positive effect of one man’s life on a small community, the way in which facts sometimes have very little to do with the truth, and that the truth is gossamer anyway.

PB: Mr. Jannetta and I have discussed this extensively. We both want standing ovations and frenzied women ripping off our clothes. We’d also like to put Chadron on the map and prove once and for all that the place called Nebraska really exists. As with the book, most will be pleased by the documentary, but there will be grumps, rubes, dorks, loafers, and killers who’ll choose not to like it. Vive la difference!

Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere

Filmmaker Dave Jannetta has made a sort of companion piece to author Poe Ballentine’s (real name Ed Hughes) book of the same title. Ballentine resides in Chadron, Nebraska, a small, isolated town that’s home to a bizarre unsolved mystery; in 2006, math professor Steven Haataja was found 3 months after disappearing, tied to a tree and burnt beyond recognition. Jannetta uses Haataja’s death as a springboard for exploring the townspeople and, more specifically, Ballentine’s life.

One’s enjoyment of Love and Terror… will depend on whether or not the topics Jannetta profiles are as compelling as the main mystery. His film settles into a simple rhythm, going back and forth between Haataja’s death, Ballentine’s life and the defining characteristics of Chadron itself. Some of these segments are interesting, but other times the small town eccentricities are more boring than quirky.

And despite its efforts to be more than a true crime documentary, Love and Terror… shines when it focuses on Haataja’s story. There’s a kind of mass confusion in the town when it comes to Haataja’s disappearance, from the inconsistent speculation of townspeople (usually one person’s claim will be followed by another person claiming the exact opposite) to the local police’s incompetence when it came to finding the missing professor. Commentary on the case by Chadron’s citizens end up providing many of the film’s highlights, including one person openly admitting they would be the prime suspect if Haataja was murdered.

Overall, Jannetta presents a compelling yet somewhat uneven portrait of a small town, and the unsolved mystery that’s gripped them for years.

Come back tomorrow for an interview with Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere director Dave Jannetta and author Poe Ballantine!

An Honest Liar

James Randi is the kind of elusive, charismatic public figure perfect for a documentary, and even at 85 his life is still filled with plenty of surprises. Randi originally started out as “The Amazing Randi,” a magician and escape artist who loved using the deception of magic to entertain audiences. Once he saw people using the same techniques to take advantage of others, Randi began to devote his time to exposing psychics, faith healers, etc. as the frauds they really are.

Randi’s stories from his earlier days of taking down different hoaxes are highly entertaining, like his feud with Uri Gellar or exposure of Peter Popoff’s ministry. The most fascinating segment is Randi’s “Project Alpha,” a long con mission to infiltrate a parapsychological study. The interviews with Randi’s partners on the project, two young magicians, are the best examples of the doc’s commentary on deception. Randi kept debunking people for using lies to deceive rather than entertain, but he had to lie and deceive others in order to prove his points.

Unfortunately, directors Justin Weinstein and Tyler Measom decide to falsely connect Randi’s work with his decision to hide his sexual orientation for most of his life. The framing of Randi’s being closeted as a deception is bothersome for obvious reasons, along with a final act revelation involving Randi’s partner that makes another false relation to Randi’s professional life. Weinstein and Measom’s documentary is fascinating and enjoyable for the most part, but it’s not without its flaws.

Whitey: United States of America v. James J. Bulger

Paradise Lost co-director Joe Berlinger is back with another compelling crime documentary. This time he sets his sights on infamous Boston gangster Whitey Bulger, who terrorized Boston for decades before going into hiding in the 90s (the only person higher than him on the FBI’s most wanted list? Osama Bin Laden). Bulger was finally caught in 2011, and Berlinger travels to Boston to film the craziness surrounding Bulger’s trial (cameras weren’t allowed in the court room, making Berlinger rely on transcripts to construct what happens).

Bulger’s defense team doesn’t try to argue his innocence. Instead, they fight the FBI’s claims that he was an informant, saying it was the other way around. Bulger paid off FBI agents to make sure no one at the agency would try and take him down, and the corrupt agents would claim him as an informant to help close their cases. That’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the different accusations getting thrown around in the film, and through all of them one thing is clear: Everyone has something to cover up, and finding out the truth will never happen. Berlinger is a pro at documentaries, and it shows. His film is dense and fast-paced, filled to the brim with shady characters and some persuasive arguments from Bulger’s defense team. Even at 107 minutes Whitey feels awfully cramped, and some breathing room might have made the barrage of information go down easier, but it’s still a riveting documentary.

Be sure to look out for our interview with Whitey director Joe Berlinger during Hot Docs!

Now that I’ve seen over a dozen of Hot Docs’ selections so far, I can see patterns begin to emerge between films. The three films profiled in today’s piece, all of which are the best documentaries I’ve seen so far at the festival, share a common narrative. The subjects in The Overnighters, Watchers of the Sky and The Creator of the Jungle are all people wanting to do what’s right for them or others, and despite constant resistance from everyone else they never stop fighting. These narratives form in different ways; a pastor tries to “love thy neighbour,” even if it destroys his life; a group of people try to prevent genocide, and bring those responsible to justice; and one man refuses to give up his childlike sense of imagination and creativity even as outside forces give him no choice.

Three different stories, all of them containing a fundamentally strong narrative. These are the kinds of films deserving a bigger audience, and the reason why festivals like Hot Docs exist. To learn more about the three films, including how to get tickets, go to www.hotdocs.ca.

The Overnighters

“I don’t say ‘no’ very well…so it’s easier to say ‘yes’ and live with the consequences.”

Virtue is a burden in Jesse Moss’ The Overnighters. Taking place in Williston, North Dakota, Moss begins his film by exploring the town’s increase in popularity as oil companies in the area hand out high-paying jobs to anyone willing to work. This leads to an influx of people from all over America, arriving with the hope of getting a job. Pastor Jay Reinke starts allowing dozens of new arrivals to sleep in his church (or in their cars in the church’s parking lot) until they can get back on their feet. Moss then shifts the focus of his film to Reinke’s battle with the town, as their hostility to the out-of-towners (fueled in part by the murder of a local teacher) begins a campaign to shut down Reinke’s program.

Moss clearly has one hell of a story to tell, and watching Reinke’s world fall apart as he stubbornly continues to help new arrivals is riveting. Sometimes The Overnighters feels like Moss is forcing what he has into fitting the narrative he wants to tell (some moments feel rehearsed or set-up, giving a reality TV vibe), but for the most part Moss does an excellent job weaving his footage into a gripping drama. And if the insanity Moss captures from Reinke’s battle with his town isn’t enough, a devastating last-minute revelation ends up redefining everything that came before it. The Overnighters is a roller coaster, and will most likely end up being one of the best documentaries this year.

Watchers of the Sky

Raphael Lemkin was a Polish lawyer who spent his life trying to make the crime of genocide punishable by law. Lemkin actually coined the term genocide, and his own experiences (deportation in WWI, losing his entire family to the Nazis in WWII) fueled his desire to see that people responsible for mass killings would face justice for their actions.

Director Edet Belzberg uses Lemkin’s story to examine how society still remains apathetic to acts of genocide occurring around the world, using a narrow focus to address a topic of such a large scale. US Ambassador Samantha Power (whose book inspired the doc) tells Lemkin’s life story while detailing recent examples of atrocities; Rwandan Emmanuel Uwurukundo tries to help refugees in the current genocide occurring in Darfur; Ben Ferencz tries to continue Lemkin’s legacy, lobbying the UN to consider war-making a crime against humanity; and Luis Moreno Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court at The Hague.

Belzberg uses her four subjects well, with Power covering history/context and the other three showing their difficult battles to continue in Lemkin’s footsteps. The result is a beautiful tale of people fighting valiantly for what they know is right, even if they might never live to see any results. The film’s moving ending (and one of my favourite moments of the year), where Fenecz explains the title’s meaning, is a perfect summation of the grueling hopefulness these four people put themselves through. All these people can do is hope that, if they don’t succeed, their work will make it easier for the person who does.

The Creator of the Jungle

The Creator of the Jungle is the kind of story that needs to be seen. Garrell has spent 45 years of his life building his own world in a forest near his house, only to see it repeatedly attacked by others. The documentary chronicles over 2 decades of Garrell’s life, as he continues destroying and rebuilding his creations just so he can keep playing on his own. It’s a can’t miss title at Hot Docs, and one of the more delightful films of the year so far.

Read our full-length review of The Creator of the Jungle HERE and stay tuned for an interview with director Jordi Morató.

Love Me

The documentary begins and ends with the same question, what is love? Director Jonathon Narducci attempts to answer that question by following around several men who are desperately searching for love. These men come from various backgrounds and relationship histories, ranging from recently divorced to men who have only been in one long-term relationship. But these men share a common mission, to find a loving companion through a popular mail-order bride website.

It becomes downright fascinating to watch these delusional men get suckered into the booming Ukraine mail-order bride industry. Even though these men are similar to the people who get swindled into email scams, it’s hard not to have a humanizing response when one of the subjects utters, “I don’t want to be alone anymore.” So these men pony up tens of thousands of dollars to travel to the Ukraine for social meet-ups with women organized by the website.

At these social parties, young beautiful women outnumber the men 10-to-1 and seem to take unconditional interest in the men. This seems way too good to actually be true. Eventually some of the subjects finally start to question the legitimacy. The best moment in Love Me shows a man who traveled to the Ukraine to meet the girl he exchanged ten-dollar emails with, only to be stood up and left to wonder if it was just a $10,000 scam. It’s absolutely heartbreaking to watch.

Love Me obeys a golden rule in documentary filmmaking by not forcing an agenda. It would’ve been easy to ridicule these desperate men on their unrealistic quest for love. But the documentary refrains from doing so, highlighting their innocence and desire for basic human companionship. Perhaps the most shocking part of the documentary is that not all the relationships were completely bogus. Though Narducci never finds a concrete answer for what love is or how to exactly find it, Love me serves as a lesson that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Don’t Leave Me (Ne Me Quitte Pas)

When Marcel’s wife leaves him after sixteen-years of marriage he copes the only way he knows how, hitting the bottle hard with his best friend Bob. They claim to want to disappear from life, though it’s hard to tell how serious they actually are when they describe various methods of suicide so casually. In the beginning, their silly actions under the influence are played for laughs, but when signs of alcoholism are noticeable Don’t Leave Me shifts into a much more depressing tone.

Directors Sabine Lubbe Bakker and Niels van Koevorden do an excellent job of staying out of the way and simply observe the two friends chat while they consume heavy doses of alcohol. But there are times when the camera remains fixated on the characters without anything compelling happening–a lengthy scene with Marcel listening to the radio while eating ice cream comes to mind. Thankfully, the documentary makes up for some of these tedious moments by capturing breathtaking views of the Belgium countryside. The filmmakers save the best for last as Don’t Leave Me ends with a harrowing final shot which makes the whole experience rewarding. The ending alone makes this documentary worth watching.

The Creator of the Jungle tells the story of Garrell, a man who has spent 45 years building a giant playground in a forest. He started as a child, and with age the scale of his work increased dramatically. He first manipulated the stream running through the forest, making dams and ponds as he saw fit. He soon brought animals into the forest, building increasingly large structures out of whatever he could grab in the forest. Over time, Garrell’s playfulness turned his forest into a bizarre ghost town of sorts.

Through camcorder footage taken in the 90s by Aleix, an unseen teenage boy who admired Garrell’s work, director Jordi Morató unveils one piece of incredible footage after another to tell his subject’s story. Aleix and Garrell spent their days making Tarzan movies in his forest, and even through the grainy VHS images the scale of Garrell’s work is jaw dropping. Problems start for Garrell once his creations, including a kilometre long labyrinth made entirely from tree branches, attract the attention of local vandals.

Morató narrates over Aleix’s footage, filling in details about Garrell’s life. He used Aleix’s camera to direct and star in Tarzan movies, using the forest as a set for Tarzan’s jungle. These short films, containing an infectious lo-fi DIY charm to them, were a way for Garrell to vent his frustrations about his work being destroyed. Each Tarzan movie would involve the “civilized man” trying to invade the jungle and ruin his home. Garrell is, essentially, a kid at heart just wanting to play on his own, and his dogged enthusiasm to expanding his ‘world’ makes it hard to not admire him.

And as time goes on, watching Garrell’s resilience turns those feelings of admiration into amazement. At one point Morató stops narrating over Aleix’s tapes, letting the last Tarzan movie (titled “The Last Two of the Tribe”) play out uninterrupted. It’s the high point of the doc, showing how good Garrell is when it comes to expressing his visions. Even more amazing is what happens afterward; after being attacked by vandals, Garrell simply destroys everything and rebuilds from scratch, and ends up making everything bigger and better than it was before. As the years begin to pass, and Morató starts filming Garrell’s playground, the sights are even more impressive through the HD photography.

Morató’s focus on Garrell’s work does leave a little to be desired over its scant 75 minute length, but the basic approach and terrific subject are enough to make for a seriously impressive documentary. At its core, The Creator of the Jungle is about one man’s decades-long battle to preserve his sense of playfulness from the world around him. It’s captivating, delightful, tragic at times and ultimately a story one needs to see to believe.

With almost 200 documentaries playing at Hot Docs, the amount of variety on display is quite staggering. Social issues, personal stories, biographies, abstract docs and true crime stories are some examples of the plethora of topics regularly seen at the festival every year. This group of four films highlight the vast differences and fundamental similarities between the many films presented to audiences over the next two weeks. These four docs (a meditation on labour, a writer touring across America, a tragic story of injustice, a group of outcasts  uniting together to entertain) look different on the surface, but all of them focus on human stories.

The Hot Docs Film Festival runs from April 24 to May 4 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. To find out more information about what’s playing or buy tickets, go to www.hotdocs.ca

Joy of Man’s Desiring

Denis Côté’s latest film opens with a close-up of a woman speaking to someone off camera. “Be polite, respectful, honest. Or I’ll destroy you if I want to,” she says calmly. What follows is 70 minutes of mostly wordless footage of industrial workers at their jobs, with the exception of some fictional conversations between workers (actually actors) toward the end.

Côté addresses plenty of big, rich ideas throughout Joy of Man’s Desiring. The relationship between man and machine, the kind of non-stop, repetitive tasks that come with working, and how humans try to find accomplishment or happiness through their mundane work are some of the more interesting topics brought up in the film. Côté doesn’t do much with his film’s themes though, seemingly content with just bringing them up rather than exploring them.

While Côté’s substance lacks depth, his style seriously impresses. His precise framing, combined with Nicholas Roy’s editing along with terrific sound design by Frédéric Cloutier & Clovis Gouaillie, makes Joy of Man’s Desiring an aesthetically pleasing experience. It’s an  interesting docu/fiction hybrid, but a minor work nonethless.

Harmontown

Dan Harmon, the creator of Community, is also the host of a podcast that Harmontown gets its title from. Harmon is known for being completely honest with people, and when he got a little too honest about behind the scenes drama on Community NBC fired him. Harmon used his unemployment as an opportunity to take his podcast on a live tour across America, taking co-host Jeff Davis, “Dungeon Master” Spencer and girlfriend Erin McGathy along. Director Neil Berkeley has made a funny, raw and enjoyable documentary that can appeal to fans of Harmon as well as people unfamiliar with his work.

The point Berkeley makes throughout his film is how Harmon’s openness about his problems (at one point he brings an audience member on stage to mediate a serious argument between him and his girlfriend; another time he dedicates his show to discussing depression with audience members), along with his ability to bring humour into these serious topics, has a therapeutic effect on people. Different people tell Harmon how Community helped get them through personal traumas or finally gave them confidence to do things they wouldn’t normally do (one woman says she would have been “too chickenshit” to meet Harmon if it wasn’t for his show). This message is best exemplified through Spencer, an introverted Dungeons and Dragons fan who went from an audience member at a taping to a fan favourite on the podcast.

Before Harmontown slips into praising its subject too highly, Berkeley steps back a bit to show how self-destructive and self-hating Harmon can be. At first he’s taken aback by the generosity of his fans, amazed that they’re happy to just watch him be himself, but eventually he starts to hate being seen as a hero. Most of Harmontown‘s last act goes into much darker territory than one would anticipate, and that decision is what elevates this beyond a boring road trip doc. Harmontown may not be a very memorable documentary, but it’s funny and entertaining enough to earn a recommendation for Harmon fans (not that they need one).

No Lullaby

No Lullaby is a powerful documentary, but an incredibly tough one to sit through. Director Helen Simon films Tina Reuther, a woman now in her late 50s dealing with the suicide of her daughter Floh. Tina was sexually abused by her father as a child, and for years she repressed those memories while trying to make her own family. It wasn’t until Floh was in her early 20s that she admitted Tina’s father also sexually abused her since the age of 5, and Floh’s decision to take her grandfather to court leads to devastating consequences.

Interviews with Tina and one of Floh’s friends are intercut with a narrator monotonously reading transcripts of the trial. The sterile quality of the narration, combined with Simon’s stark footage accompanying it, make Floh and Tina’s graphic testimonies hit like a gut punch. The tactic is extremely effective, and by the time the jury reaches its verdict it’s hard not to feel numb from how much injustice is on display.

Viewers willing to handle the tough material should watch No Lullaby, as its impact is undeniably strong. Through her simple and artistic approach, Simon handles Tina’s story respectfully, putting the emphasis on how much society failed Tina and Floh. The implication that Tina stayed alive because of her silence might be the most disturbing aspect of No Lullaby; stories like hers are necessary reminders of how much the systems meant to help victims can end up hurting them even more.

Stay tuned to our Hot Docs 2014 coverage for an interview with No Lullaby director Helen Simon.

Before The Last Curtain Falls

“Gardenia” was a stage show made up of transsexuals and drag queens in their 60s and 70s performing pieces based on their lives. The show became a surprise hit, and its performers spent two years travelling the world doing shows. Before The Last Curtain Falls starts as the “Gardenia” cast come back to their hometown of Ghent, Belgium, to put on their final show.

Thomas Wallner combines performances from “Gardenia” with profiles of several cast members, getting a sense of their lives as they get ready to end their two-year journey. The cast make for an expectedly eclectic bunch: Danilo works full-time as a janitor at a brothel; Richard is a nurse who left his job to follow his passion of performing in the show; Gerrit used to be known as Sylvia, but in his older years has gone back to living as a man in order to work.

A portrait begins to emerge of this group of people as constant fighters, and amazingly their strength doesn’t appear to have weakened one bit. They’ve all led difficult lives, but even in “the autumn of their lives” (as the opening titles state) they’re still looking for love and happiness. There’s a level of defiance and individuality to “Gardenia’s” cast that’s admirable all on its own.

And when Wallner does film everyone together on stage the results are excellent. The cinematography is gorgeous, and some moments in “Gardenia” are moving when combined with the terrific camerawork. The repetitive, meandering final act feels like the film is desperately looking for an ending before giving up, but it’s “Gardenia” and its cast that makes Before The Last Curtain Falls worth seeking out.