Documentary Blitz

In a summer which featured all manner of uninspired, under-performing zillion dollar sequels (Charlie’s Angels 2, Legally Blonde 2, etc) and failed attempts to kickstart new movie franchises (Hulk, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen), it’s not surprising that the American cinema going public developed an appetite for something novel. But who could have foreseen that the three biggest films in recent months for the chattering, watercooler classes would all be documentaries? Capturing The Friedmans, Winged Migration and Spellbound have all grossed substantially more than anyone envisaged, and captured the public imagination. The rather good news is that the Stranger Than Fiction Documentary Film Festival at the IFC offers discerning Irish audiences a chance to see these and other eagerly awaited titles.

The programme also boasts workshops from Oscar winners Steve James (Hoop Dreams) and Kevin MacDonald, whose Touching The Void will open the festival. A follow-up to his highly successful Academy Award winning account of the Israeli hostage crisis at the 1972 Olympics, One Day In September, Void is a gripping docu-drama which recreates two British climbers’ attempts to conquer a 21,000-foot peak in the Peruvian Andes. The film is based on the best-selling book by Joe Simpson who survived a descent from the climb. It’s perhaps not an obvious choice for MacDonald, who admits to knowing practically nothing about mountains, Peruvian or otherwise. “A couple of things really appealed to me about this story.” the director explains, “it was a really great adventure tale, but there were deeper aspects to it – like what keeps us going to survive the impossible, and how do we deal with the realisation that God doesn’t exist. Mountaineering was also a totally fascinating and alien world for me and the strangeness of it was part of the appeal.”
Like One Day In September, a huge challenge with Void was the building of narrative tension when the very involvement of the two climbers concerned makes the outcome obvious to all. “That was a challenge” says MacDonald, “but not the challenge that you might think. After all, all cinema requires a certain amount of disbelief. The audience always knows that Tom Cruise is going to survive, and they always know that Hugh Grant is going to end up with Andie MacDowell. It’s never really the outcome of a movie that’s relevant. It’s how you get there that matters. With this film, it’s all the little subtle things that you get from people telling a story. All those small human things.”
With the current crop of prominent documentary releases, MacDonald is hopeful that the multiplexes might actually consider giving over space to documentary films. “I really hope that the current levels of interest aren’t just a passing vogue. Documentaries did once jostle for space with feature films. Even if we don’t get the same levels of interest we did during early cinema, it would be nice to think that maybe one screen in ten would be screening a documentary. It’s a lot better than being at the mercy of someone with a remote control.”

Stranger Than Fiction Documentary Film Festival is at the IFC October 2-5