When GIFF President Joseph Restaino asked me to help judge the festival’s documentary features competition, I was excited. I love me some documentaries, and often find that the true stories these movies share are more compelling, enlightening and entertaining than fiction. This year’s slate of competing docs is particularly strong, traveling the globe to find interesting folks in exotic places like Mongolia, Australia and New York City.
Three of my favorites highlight strong, diverse people doing something from a place of love.
Getting its world premier at the festival is the inspiring Theresa Sareo: Alive Again. Sareo was an up-and-coming singer/songwriter living in New York when her right leg was amputated after a horrific accident on a Manhattan street. She rehabbed and slowly began performing again, eventually hooking up with the military, the injured troops quickly warming to Sareo because of her prosthetic leg. She has since toured the world performing for service members, and one gripping sequence sees Sareo travel to Tampa to visit a soldier whose injuries are too disturbing to describe here. But Alive Again is no horror show (the film is primarily about the planning and rehearsals for a big concert), and the takeaway is uplifting and positive, largely because the charismatic Sareo is positive and upbeat throughout. Screens on Fri., March 30 at 7:45 p.m. at Muvico Centro Ybor. Sareo is scheduled to be in attendance.
Jumping from physical scars to the psychological scars of America’s past, director Nancy Buirski’s The Loving Story chronicles a sad but ultimately triumphant section of our nation’s segregated past. Richard and Mildred Loving were a couple in 1950s Virginia who were arrested for violating the state’s law against interracial marriage. The pair was eventually convicted and banished from the state in lieu of a prison sentence. The Lovings spent years sneaking back to Virginia to visit family and friends — the prospect of imminent arrest always hanging over their heads — before suing for their right to come home. The resulting case went to the Supreme Court, where a unanimous decision abolished anti-interracial immigration laws once and for all. The Loving Story mixes archival media coverage, intimate film of the Lovings shot in the 1950s and ’60s, and interviews with surviving relatives and lawyers to offer a complete look at this pivotal moment in America’s past. As amazing as The Loving Story is in itself, it’s impossible to watch the film and not reflect on our nation’s current discrimination against gay couples. What’s past truly is prologue. Screens Sat., March 31 at 7 p.m. at Muvico Centro Ybor.
Wild horses can be broken, and Wild Horse, Wild Ride is documentary proof. Every year the U.S. government rounds up thousands of mustangs from public land, with 100 of the captured horses given to private handlers for something called the Extreme Mustang Makeover Challenge. These brave souls — mostly professional horse trainers, though at least one enterprising Texas A&M PhD gets in on the action — have 100 days to break the animal before participating in a huge horse show and auction. That’s right: auction. After these people give blood, sweat and tears while bonding with and training their mustangs, most will stand idly by as the animal is sold to a new owner who reaps the rewards of all the hard work. Wild Horse, Wild Ride does what all the best documentaries do: It finds interesting people doing offbeat things and lets the highs and lows of real life drive the action. It’s also entertaining as hell. Screens Sat., March 31 at 4 p.m. at CineBistro in Old Hyde Park.
This article appears in Mar 29 – Apr 4, 2012.