Full Frame Festival jury overlooks top entry

This past weekend, the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival jury awarded the Jury Prize for Best Film to The Monastery, a lovely Danish film about an old man's long-standing dream of building a monastic paradise. But they made a mistake. The most exciting cinema this weekend was Manda Bala, director Jason Kohn's film about kidnapping and corruption in Brazil. While The Monastery offered a more reflective representation of human life, it had little to offer beyond its story.

In 2007, we find ourselves entering an age when documentaries must be held to higher standards-the proliferation of production equipment has made documentary filmmaking possible for the masses. There must be some way to measure a film's achievement. The easiest way to do this is by production value. After all, good films are born from a marriage of imagery and story. How good, for example, would Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill series be without the lensing of Bob Richardson, his director of photography? Mediocre. Would Alfonso Cuaron's Children of Men be a complete film without the incredible single-take camerawork and lighting by Emmanuel Lubezki? Absolutely not. And that brings us to Full Frame 2007 and the state of modern documentary filmmaking.

Manda Bala is, simply put, the best looking documentary I've ever seen. Shooting with anamorphic lenses on Super16MM film, Kohn fills his frames like a veteran fiction storyteller: with color and life. To call this rare in documentary film is to call Knut the baby polar bear adorable-it's so obvious it borders on idiocy. At Sundance, the risks Kohn took in making his film beautiful-selling his car, uprooting his life and moving to Brazil-were rewarded with the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary. At Full Frame, Kohn and his producer Jared Ian Goldman were left empty-handed while The Monastery brought home the gold-a $20,000 post-production grant. But The Monastery is simply not as ambitious or well-constructed as Kohn's film. Where the Danish film takes on the task of telling a simple story, Manda Bala attempts to capture the problems of an entire country and anthropomorphizes frogs. I believe it's the first time frogs have been a metaphor for humans on film. So put another mark in Manda Bala's column.

It is important to note that The Monastery is not an ugly piece of filmmaking-it's just blown out of the water by Manda Bala's visual and narrative audacity. The real question raised by the two films is this: should the filmmaking community be rewarding documentary artists for merely discovering great stories and capturing them, or should they be rewarding filmmakers for creating stories with striking visual flair, for crafting new narrative structures out of disparate pieces? In the modern fragmented world, Kohn's style is the best way to tell real stories because it is, at its very core, also constructed from fragments.

At Sundance Kohn described his desire to make "movies," not just "documentaries." And, at its essence, this is the dilemma Full Frame Jury members faced this weekend. Manda Bala was both a documentary and a movie-visuals and story. The Monastery was just a documentary. In 2007, Full Frame chose "just a documentary" for its top prize. Let's hope that in the years to come, jury members start to see that documentary doesn't mean ugly, and audacity leading to success should always be rewarded.