Sundance 2009: Eleven Documentaries to Wrestle With

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In a short video remembrance of Sundance that played before many of the screenings in Park City last week, filmmaker Davis Guggenheim says the "dirty little secret" of the festival is that the best films every year are the documentaries. That may be overstating the case a bit, but it's true that films like Man on Wire, In the Shadow of the Moon, Iraq in Fragments, Trouble the Water, The Short Life of José Antonio Gutierez, and Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired are among the most memorable films I've seen at the fest. This year, while I'm not sure I saw any flat-out masterpieces among the documentary programs, the films were almost uniformly absorbing and entertaining, even if they weren't always great cinema. Here's a recap of eleven documentaries that screened this year:

Good Hair
Chris Rock mines a surprisingly rich topic for laughs and insight in director Jeff Stilson's funny documentary about the hair of black women. Rock interviews both women and men, regular people and celebrities, to answer questions I didn't even know I had. What could have been just an excuse for an extended comedic riff is also a surprisingly informational and inquisitive film, and like every good documentary it opens my eyes to the world around me. It looks at big and small issues, explores economic, social, and practical details, and concludes, like a reality TV show, with an elaborate competition, the Bonner Brother's International Hair Show in Atlanta. It never strays too far from the jokes but never leaves its topic behind for just a laugh, and it may sound strange but Good Hair is one of the most interesting documentaries at Sundance this year.

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Big River Man
Martin Strel drinks two bottles of wine a day and has a belly that prevents him from seeing his Speedo, but under those conditions he swam the entire length of the Mississippi River. And then the Danube. And then the Yangtze. Now filmmaker John Maringouin catches Strel's latest swim, a daunting head game known as the Amazon. Strel battles treacherous waters, uncertain navigation, toxic pollution, wary locals, and his own deteriorating health, physical and mental. The film is peppered with an eclectic soundtrack and narrated by Strel's manager and son Borut whose commentary, co-written with Maringouin, is so fanciful that I began to wonder if the entire stunt — and movie — were a giant put-on. But, no, it seems to be real. The film is a ragged, expressionistic portrait of a colorful character, and when I saw Strel himself answer questions following a midnight screening, the biggest surprise for me wasn't that he was awake at 2am but that he seemed coherent and hale, given the self-imposed torture we witness in the film.

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The September Issue
R.J. Cutler demonstrates once again that he can capture, as well as anybody, the interpersonal dynamics that drive a team of headstrong individuals. Or at least he can shape his raw footage so it seems like has. He produced The War Room about Bill Clinton's presidential campaign, making bigger than life characters out of George Stephanopoulos, James Carville, and Clinton himself, and he pioneered reality TV with an innovative series called American High. Now in The September Issue he looks at the internal machinery of Vogue Magazine as run by its editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, tastemaker of the fashion industry and the inspiration for the title character of The Devil Wears Prada. She's a peach. No, really. I'm not sure I came away with a better idea of what makes Wintour and Vogue tick, but Cutler knows how to entertain, and even as someone who doesn't follow the industry I had great fun rooting for fashion editor Grace Coddington who steadfastly defends her turf.

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Art & Copy
The September Issue makes an enjoyable pairing with Art & Copy, an accidental double-feature that I saw one afternoon at Sundance. Art & Copy defends great advertising — or maybe I should say effective and influential advertising — by talking to the people who create it, telling the stories behind the creation of legendary campaigns for the Volkswagen Beetle, Tommy Hilfiger, Apple Macintosh, and good old fashioned cow's milk. By talking to the most creative people in the industry, the film makes the case for advertising as personal expression and public art, but it's art with a purpose, much like architecture. Of course almost any profession can be practiced well enough that it becomes an art, but that doesn't necessarily validate ubiquitous advertising; the film itself rarely deals with that problem and all but ignores the more common occurrence of artless advertising. I also wasn't crazy about the way it frequently pauses the discussions to present mind-numbing statistics, but when it's listening to forceful personalities, the film, like The September Issue, is great fun to watch and not without its own ideas.

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211: Anna
The last film I saw at this year's festival was an Italian, TV-quality documentary about Anna Politkovskaya, the 211th Russian journalist killed since 1991. Filmmakers Paolo Serbandini and Giovanna Massimetti talk to people who knew Politkovskaya personally and professionally and can attest to her passion for peace and stability in Chechnya. She wrote about it often. While the film itself is a bit hard to warm up to, it includes in its second half an informative account of Politkovskaya's mediative involvement in the ill-fated standoff between Russian authorities and Chechen terrorists in a Moscow theater in 2002. The film is about details more than a big picture, but it reminded me of events I'd forgotten about and told me about a few I was unaware of, and while it doesn't present much evidence to suggest that Politkovskaya was murdered by the government, it does continually return to the theme of authorities who have a stronger interest in beating terrorists than protecting their citizenry.