Last week, I sat on the Documentary Competition Jury at the Sarasota Film Festival. The lineup was extraordinarily strong, and my fellow jurors and I found something to admire about most of the eight films on the slate. In the end, we gave the grand prize (which included a DVD/VOD/Educational/Television and “first look” theatrical offer from First Run Features, as well as a guaranteed slot on the Fall 2009 lineup of Stranger Than Fiction at the IFC Center in NY) to Ben Steinbauer’s Winnebago Man, and a special cinematography award to Jody Lee Lipes, the director and camera operator of Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be The Same. I’ll write about the winning films individually as they continue their travels on the festival circuit. Below the jump, some notes on the other six films in competition.

21 Below

Samantha Buck’s film begins with one of the most powerful opening scenes I’ve ever seen in a documentary; a fight between a mother and her adult daughter shot from the backseat of a moving car, it’s a reminder that language is never more violent than between loved ones. But ultimately this scene is just one of a handful of snapshots of conflict, complicated and provocative in isolation, that add up to less than the sum of their parts. A portrait of a white, middle-class Jewish family in Buffalo struggling to accept 21 year-old daughter/sister Karen’s aggressive baby-making with a black small time crook named Courtney, 21 Below rises and falls on its diary-like narration, delivered by Karen’s older sister Sophia. What at first seems an inventive storytelling tactic sours as the narration itself begins to seem progressively, unreliably biased and judgmental. There’s a beauty and power to much of the imagery, but Buck doesn’t offer an outside perspective to shed insight on the self-sanctifying Sophia. The result is a film that occasionally seems to occasionally stumble into a gratifyingly thorny reality, but too often glides along the surface. By the time Sophia’s telling us what she learned over the course of the filming, 21 Below seems not intellectually dissimilar to glossier observational media like The Hills. A side note: there’s something fascinating about the fact that this film will be traveling the festival circuit at the same time as October Country, a documentary by Donal Mosher and Michael Palmieri set in a similar milieu but with a very different philosophy and aesthetic results. Go back a couple of years to include Billy the Kid (and surely other films that slip my immediate memory), and there’s a trend story in here somewhere about the American suburban family fighting against decomposition.

Blood Trail

15 years in the making, Richard Parry’s life-of-a-war photographer doc also starts stronger than it finishes.  We meet Robert King when he’s a 20-something budding journalist who arrives in Bosnia in 1994 with no money and even less knowledge of the conflict there, armed only with his naive braveness and a determination to win the Pullitzer prize. The first forty minutes or so of the film, in which King struggles to work (and sell work) in an environment in which all forces seem to conspire towards his failure (with the exception of friend and Blood Trail producer/co-cinematographer Vaughn Smith, King’s fellow journalists are almost as hostile as Bosnia’s fighting factions), can be edge-of-your-seat exciting. But as King becomes more established as a photographer, and correlatively more proudly prone to self-destructive self-sabotage, the film itself gets a little too drunk on King’s own journalist-as-rockstar, “life is a warzone” mythos.

Loot

Darius Marder’s feature debut, which debuts on HBO in May, tracks two WWII veterans in their longshot quests to recover pillages valuables hidden since the end of the war. As much a film about the vagaries of memory and post-traumatic stress as it is a portrait of the charismatic car salesman-turned-treasure hunter who guides the veterans (one legally blind, the other blinded by his own hoarding habit), what’s most impressive about Loot is the way the narrative unfolds so effortlessly, with impeccable timing. It’s absolutely a once-in-a-lifetime story, which is not to say that the filmmaker simply got lucky: Marder doesn’t appear in the film or offer narration, but his presence, patience and diligence, his innate understanding of how to hook an audience, is felt in every frame.

Letters to the President

An inquiry into the Iranian people’s practice of sending letters to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asking the controversial president for help with their daily lives, Petr Lom’s doc is a minor miracle of access. But constructed essentially as one conversation after another with a variety of Iranians from various walks of life, with little added context, it’s a bit lacking in artistry.

Old Partner

Repetitive but fascinating, Old Partner follows the final cycle of an unlikely domestic triangle between an old man, his wife and the ox the family has depended on to plow their Korean rice fields for 40 years. There’s a meditative simplicity to much of the film that’s right in my wheelhouse: patient, hands-off observation of the ritual of daily life; visual information given precedence over language; the emotional exposition of the put-upon wife forming a musical rhythm against the plaintive clanging of the bell around the neck of her husband’s beloved ox. Occasionally director Chung-Ryoul Lee’s taste for cinematic theatrics (canned sentimental score, sweeping camera trickery) gets in his own way, but of all the films in competition, this was the most surprising for me.

Over the Hills and Far Away

The premise sounds unbearably new-agey and nutritive: two young, beautiful liberal-intellectual parents try to cure their 4 year-old son of autism by taking him on a horseback riding excursion across Mongolia, meeting with a number of shamans along the way. Barf, right? But Michel O. Scott has made a film of extraordinary sensitivity, offering an undeniably affecting portrait of a family facing great pain and, cautiously but with a mysterious faith, moving towards relief. Over the Hills will unquestionably appeal to a niche audience based on subject matter alone, but in focusing on the individual intricacies of one experience, transcends edutainment. It’s the model of what an “issue film” should strive to look like.