From the least likely conceivable source – a real-life paedophilia case – comes one of the most astoundingly entertaining pictures in living memory. Capturing the Friedmans is first-time director Andrew Jarecki’s incredibly engrossing attempt to make sense of the confusion surrounding the case of Arnold Friedman, a Stateside high-school science teacher who was convicted on several dozen counts of child sexual abuse, and subsequently committed suicide in prison. (Friedman’s son, Jesse, was also convicted at the age of 18 of actively aiding in his father’s crimes, and served 13 years in jail before being released.)
Jarecki’s starting point for the film’s purposes is an interview with Friedman’s other son David, now one of the best-known professional childrens’ clowns in New York, who is interviewed at considerable length. More explosive by far, though, David Friedman has made 25 hours’ worth of Friedman family home videos available. The family were given to filming themselves at apparently every conceivable opportunity, whether the occasion was a Thanksgiving dinner or the aftermath of a child-porn sting arrest – and it’s fair to say you’ve simply never seen home movies like this before, as the increasingly fragmented family discuss their plight with a compelling frankness and openness.
Though studiously avoiding judgment or even commentary throughout, Jarecki also exposes a number of flaws in the prosecution’s case, and though it’s clear by the end that at least one Friedman was guilty of brutal molestation, it’s even more obvious that the ensuing witch-hunt led to dangerous interference with due process, and collective suspension of rationality, as is ever the case with witch-hunts.
Though not quite in accordance with most people’s notions of entertainment, Capturing the Friedmans is a profoundly unsettling, frequently heartbreaking, and genuinely unmissable film.

107 mins. cert 15pg. opens April 9