Back in Berlin, Madonna’s directorial debut Filth and Wisdom, which had something to do with cross dressers and strippers and generally drifted not far beyond Madonna’s expertise in sex and success, garnered some surprisingly positive reviews. But everyone I’ve spoken to who’s covering or attending Tribeca was planning on skipping I Am Because We Are, a documentary about Malawi written, produced and narrated by the star, based on the assumption that diagnosing international crises is just a little bit beyond the capabilities of a singer who has spent the past five years working her way through various Mouseketeers in search of renewed credibility.

I haven’t seen the film (I skipped Friday’s press screening in order to see Shane Meadows’ Somers Town, and I’m glad I did––more on that virtually perfect film later today), but out of curiosity, I went trolling the web this morning for reviews. Surprise, surprise––Madonna’s ethics as a documentary filmmaker are under fire from all sides.

Let’s start with what Jakob Lodwick, internet boy millionaire (he’s the co-founder of College Humor and Vimeo) and sometime blogebrity has to say. I don’t think Lodwick has seen the movie either, but he has read an interview with Madonna at New York Magazine. In this blog post, he isolates the following exchange:

New York Magazine: In the movie, you look at one ritual in which a young woman is told she must have sex with a man three times in a day, in order to “cleanse” her.

Madonna: It’s not my place to judge that tradition.

Lodwick disagrees. He writes: “Madonna, as one of the most influential artists in the world, your failure to apply your faculty of judgment to tribal rape is deplorabe [sic]. For your comments, you are a piece of trash.”

It should be noted first that Lodwick is taking the quote out of context. Immediately after saying that she’s not going to judge that tradition, Madonna essentially judges the tradition, noting that such practices lead to the spread of AIDS and referring to the process of combating such cultural traditions as “mind-bogglingly frustrating.” But more importantly, to suggest that it’s the place of a documentary filmmaker to necessarily judge their subjects is to offer an extremely limited view of documentary film theory. If passing judgment were integral to non-fiction storytelling, wouldn’t Bill O’Reilly qualify as a master of the form?

Slightly more convincing is Roger Friedman’s long screed against the film, published after Thursday’s premiere, in which he accuses Madonna and the film’s director/her former gardener (!) of exploiting Malawi to promote Kabbalah.

Indeed, the film actually shows Malawi’s adults regurgitating Kabbalah propaganda they’ve been inculcated with in order to teach the orphans in their country…It’s kind of shocking — after seeing all the poverty and disease that’s been imposed on them — to hear Malawi’s children then recite back the Kabbalah/SFK dictum that they themselves “are responsible for their choices” and that “their actions can positively influence the quality of their lives.”

Again, to hear that Madonna has done something a bit self-serving isn’t really a surprise. But to me, turning a camera on your own efforts to change a community’s system of beliefs is a much grander breach of documentary ethics than telling a interviewer, after the fact, that you’re not going to judge the way that community behaves. Madonna may very well be a piece of trash, but her refusal to say “rape is bad” seems like the tip of the iceberg.