Recess film editor Charlie McSpadden navigates through the 100+ documentaries to give you his Full Frame picks.
THE BIG NAMES
D.A. Pennebaker, the cinema verite documentarian whose past subjects include Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix and David Bowie, kicks off the festival with Kings of Pastry, an insight into the intense competition for the French pastry world’s most esteemed award. After the screening, Pennebaker, co-director Chris Hegedus and pastry chef Jacquy Pfeiffer will participate in a conversation to be moderated by New York Times dining reporter Julia Moskin. A similar level of festival buzz surrounds directors Michel Gondry and Steven Soderburgh, who step back from fiction and tap into their documentary palette. Soderburgh’s And Everything is Going Fine honors the late monologuist Spalding Gray, a collaborator and close friend of the director, and Gondry’s The Thorn in the Heart centers around Gondry’s aunt Suzette as she tours the camera through the locales of the family’s past.
Casino Jack and the United States of Money, the latest from Oscar winner Alex Gibney who helmed the memorable Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, details another astounding American scandal. Gibney looks to be on top of his game as he recounts how Jack Abramoff bribed over 20 members of Congress and swindled six Native American casino-owning tribes out of tens of millions of dollars. Perhaps benefiting from the Durham basketball fever will be Dante James, who returns to the festival with No Crossover: The Trail of Allen Iverson. James, who helped curate a series of sports films at last year’s festival, is back with a look at the racially charged fight that sent the high-school-aged Iverson to jail.
THE INTERNATIONAL
The festival’s global flair once again burns bright this year, with filmmakers hailing everywhere from Finland to Iran to Sierra Leone, with topical countries ranging from Guatamala to Cambodia to Kazakhstan. Albert’s Winter, the latest offering from Danish filmmaker Andreas Koefoed, who won Best Short at last year’s festival for 12 Notes Down, documents a young boy dealing with his mother’s illness. Summer Pasture follows a young Tibetan couple as they choose between continuing a life of herding yaks at an elevation of 15,000 feet or raising their newborn girl in the modern world. David Christensen’s The Mirror takes place at a similar altitude, depicting the mayor of a small hamlet in the Italian Alps as he attempts to solve his town’s issues. And new Iranian doc The Poot might entice the interior decorators of the world, chronicling the intricate process of how Persian rugs are made.
THE MUSIC DOC
Music lovers can look forward to Do It Again, in which formerly Raleigh-based reporter Geoff Edgers tries to reunite British rock band the Kinks, seeking out help from Kinks supporters like Sting and Zooey Deschanel. Edgers and director Robert Patton-Spruill will speak after the screening, and cover band the Kinksmen will perform. Strange Powers offers a rare insight into the life of Magnetic Fields’ lead singer Stephin Merritt, while Thunder Soul sheds light on the famous high-school jazz and funk group Kashmere Stage Band.
THEMATIC PROGRAM: LABOR
Full Frame appointed filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichart as curators for a series of films about labor for this year’s thematic program. Standouts include 2000’s Live Nude Girls UNITE!, about San Francisco peep show workers trying to form a strippers’ union, 2005’s Chinese jean-factory expose China Blue, and Man Push Cart, a film about a Pakistani rock star who ends up selling coffee and bagels on the streets of Manhattan. After presenting their poignant new documentary The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant, Bognar and Reichart will moderate a panel discussion with many of the program’s filmmakers.
THE ENVIRONMENTAL DOC
Always a hot documentary topic at the festival, the environment will primarily be chronicled in Peter Bell’s Dirty Business, which follows Rolling Stone writer Jeff Goodell as he unearths lies about clean coal. Additionally, Sun Come Up, a short about the residents of a South Pacific island whose bucolic existence is threatened by rising ocean tides, and Waste Land, which chronicles Brazilian artist Vik Muniz as he turns a Rio de Janeiro landfill into art, both look promising.
COUNTRY IN CRISIS
Restrepo, Grand Jury Prize winner at Sundance, is a harsh and harrowing look into the lives of American soldiers in Afghanistan, and fellow Sundance alum My Perestroika presents a portrait of Russia during and post-Soviet Union collapse. Enemies of the People takes an investigatory look at the slaughter of millions of Cambodians during the Khmer Rouge regime, and Rebecca Richman Cohen’s War Don Don charts the war crimes trials after a decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone.
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