Silverdocs 2007 Guide From Zen chefs to long-haul truckers, from the statehouse to the moon, this year's Silverdocs covers a lot of turf.

Documentaries are supposed to be good for you. That's why many filmgoers treat them as the cinematic equivalent of leafy vegetables: They're worthy but unappetizing, filled with information about such subjects as the difficulties of emerging from a vegetative state (Coma), the legislative process in Idaho (State Legislature), or Palestinian political organizing in Israeli prisons (Hothouse). But documentaries can also be contemplative, funny, and poetic, as this year's edition of Silverdocs demonstrates, with such entries as Forever (on the afterlives of great artists buried in Paris' most famous cemetery), How to Cook Your Life (a droll Zen master's kitchen tips), and three films by Jem Cohen, the bard of the street scene and vapor trail.

This year's AFI/Discovery Channel documentary festival includes more than 100 films, about 60 of them features. Washington City Paper's critics viewed half the features and reviewed 26 of them. This looks to be the strongest slate in Silverdocs' five-year history, but we particularly recommend-in addition to the films mentioned elsewhere - Big Rig, a look at truckers on the road, and two portraits of "sustainable" existence, Off the Grid and Garbage Warrior. (We'll wait until its commercial release to comment on No End in Sight, another analysis of the Iraq War.)

The featured theme of this year's Silverdocs is "Beyond Belief," a category that includes at least three fine films: Stand Up: Muslim-American Comics Come of Age, Audience of One (the tale of a Pentecostal minister who decides to make a sci-fi film), and Living Goddess (in which the life of an 8-year-old Nepalese avatar turns out not to be so cute). While only seven features are classified as "Beyond Belief," the subject seems to have infiltrated the entire fest, from an activist priest in the Dominican Republic in The Price of Sugar to the anti-Santa antics of What Would Jesus Buy? It seems that documentaries aren't just about worthy information; they're about the search, however problematic, for something to believe in.

- Mark Jenkins

Silverdocs runs Tuesday, June 12, to Sunday, June 17. Showings take place at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center, 8633 Colesville Road, Silver Spring, and are $10. For more information, call (877) 362-7849 or visit silverdocs.com.

Remember that exhilarating moment in Awakenings when the frozen patients just wake up, catch balls in the air, sing, dance, and recall wanting to have sex? This isn’t that. In Coma, which follows four people in the first critical year after suffering head trauma, reality is a sad, frustrating existence, and there’s no big payoff. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth your time to get to know these patients, their families, and their doctors at the JFK Johnson Rehabilitation Institute in Edison, N.J. Tom, a 31-year-old sales manager, fell from a balcony. As he enters the MRI tube, his eyes open but not registering much, his fiancée relates to him the story of how he proposed. Sean, 20, was a college student in Europe when he was thrown from a bridge during an attack. His mom quits her job to watch each slow drip of his minimal progress. Roxie, 19, also a college student, wears diapers and cannot hold still but shows the most promise. Like Al’Khan, 26, a father whose prognosis is bleak, she was injured in a car accident. They are all in various stages of waking life, but they are not and likely never will be who they were. Their mothers are all pushed back into the role of wiping drool and sounding out words with their grown children. They’re the ones who break your heart. Filmmaker and Academy Award nominee Liz Garbus takes a fly-on-the-wall approach, and Coma features more observation than storytelling. She seems to want to give people their privacy and space while still leaving an audience who may have forgotten Terri Schiavo with a vivid reminder: If severe brain injury should happen to you, know what you want and make your wishes clear.

This film’s beautiful title becomes less beautiful upon closer inspection. “Devil on a horse” is the English translation of “Janjaweed,” the government-­sponsored militia tasked with cleansing Sudan’s Darfur region of its rebels and, indeed, its Africans. The ensuing carnage has been well documented by numerous outlets, but The Devil Came on Horseback comes at the story through the eyes of American Brian Steidle, an ex-Marine who volunteered in 2004 to monitor a cease-fire between Sudan’s northern and southern regions. In a matter of weeks, he was drawn into an entirely different conflict that pitted Arabs against Africans and left behind a scorched-earth trail of burned villages and maimed bodies. Steidle had his camera shutter open the whole time, and those images, already familiar to many Americans, still have a haunting, incantatory power. But Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern’s film loses its force the moment it leaves behind the particularities of Darfur. We watch Steidle sounding the alarm from D.C. to the Hague, and we are meant to register the pain in his limpid blue eyes as each new sheriff (Condoleezza Rice, the United Nations) turns a deaf ear. “I knew that bad things happen,” he confesses. “I didn’t know that the world would stand by and allow them to happen.” In fact, the world has done just that, from time immemorial, as Steidle himself acknowledges when he pays a belated visit to Rwanda. It is no disservice to Darfur’s 400,000 dead or to its 2.5 million displaced to suggest that Steidle’s story might have been optimally told in a 60 Minutes segment—and that the passage from innocence to disillusionment might have been handled more evocatively through fiction.

At the beginning of Frederick Wiseman’s characteristically extensive institutional study, the speaker of Idaho’s House of Representatives reaches for a ranching metaphor. Yet four hours later, as a bagpiper closes the session, the dominant impression is not of a place that’s remote or provincial. Despite Idaho’s reputation for hyperconservatism, both the people and the issues in this film could be inside-the-Beltway phenomena. Yes, someone is trying to get the Ten Commandments displayed in the statehouse, but the arguments against the proposal sound pretty much as they would in Annapolis or Albany, N.Y. And the other topics for discussion include restaurant smoking bans, proper disposal of high-tech trash, driving licenses for undocumented workers, and “video vorism” (which must be Idahoan for “voyeurism”). Indeed, both the arguments and the terrain—wood-paneled hearing rooms and a marble rotunda—are all too familiar. Plus, since most of the legislators and staffers are pros at public expression, unguarded moments are rarer than in other Wiseman films. Political junkies may be enthralled by the proceedings, but they probably won’t be surprised.

By the time Michael Reynolds graduated from architecture school, some 35 years ago, he had already decided that the field “as it stood then, was worthless.” So he moved to New Mexico and began experimenting with houses that exist entirely “off the grid” and are built mostly from recycled materials. He ended up creating several communities, a group of followers, and trouble: Taos County’s planning department cracked down in 1997, and Reynolds’ battle for sustainable architecture shifted to the state legislature. His legal success was limited, but an invitation from the post-tsunami Andaman Islands, located in the Bay of Bengal, was more effective. Reynolds and his crew built houses there out of mud and used plastic bottles, capturing rain for both water and cooling. Director Oliver Hodge deftly shifts from a character study of a neo-Jeffersonian populist—Reynolds thinks cities are “dangerous area[s] of chaos”—to an object lesson in sustainability. But Hodge also recognizes that the embrace of Reynolds’ ideas in a catastrophic Third World landscape doesn’t guarantee they’ll be accepted in a country that can afford resource-burning McMansions. (Reynolds will attend the first showing.)

“Whenever I travel on a plane, I know exactly who the air marshal is,” comedian Ahmed Ahmed confides in Stand Up: Muslim-American Comics Come of Age. “It’s always the guy holding the People magazine upside-down and looking right at me.” This film by Glenn Baker and Omar Naim focuses on the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival, an event founded in 2003 by Maysoon Zayid and Dean Obeidallah (who goes by the unprovocative stage name Dean Joseph).It’s a talent show, but it’s also an opportunity for participants to use humor to explain what it’s been like for them to live in this country since 9/11. Stand Up features news footage of hate crimes against anyone with brown skin and relates a 2006 ABC/Washington Post poll that claims nearly half of Americans hold negative views of Islam, while a quarter are “extremely” anti-Muslim. Stand Up is thought-provoking but far from a downer: The comedians trailed here are quite funny and seemingly comfortable spinning their surely hurtful experiences over the past six years into material, such as Obeidallah’s cheery riff on an overheard comment that “Arabs are the new blacks.” (“What’s up, Moustafa?” he imagines cool kids in tilted headdresses saying to one another.) The festival has been a success, attracting a large, diverse audience. But considering that the New York Post once ran a positive review of the event accompanied by a caption about Ahmed “trying not to ‘suicide bomb’ during his set,” it’s clear that the comedians’ efforts are just baby steps.

Thanks to “mature porn” fetishists and HBO’s Real Sex series, doin’ the deed after 65 is no longer much of a shocker. If seniors enjoy gardening and the occasional round of golf, why shouldn’t they prove ready, willing, and able to fuck one another’s brains out on camera? But voyeuristic, pseudo-titillating exposés on what goes on in Grandma’s and Grandpa’s boudoir focus on grunting, straining bodies, not how the passing decades change the human libido. Happily, Sarah Gonser and Lance Kruger’s Waking Aphrodite asks the tough questions that grannyfuck.com won’t: The old folks at home can still get some, but what does getting some mean when one is a card-carrying AARP member? Waking Aphrodite’s subject should know—Maggie Tapert, Gonser’s mother, abandoned a life as a strait-laced, Midwestern Catholic girl to become Switzerland’s answer to Annie Sprinkle. Gonser isn’t content to glamorize her mom’s atypical decision to become a sex therapist but instead explores Tapert’s existential struggle to refocus her life beyond the bedroom as she cares for a sickly spouse and grandmotherhood comes calling. The film suffers from a few tediously sensual S&M workshop sequences, a bland “world music” soundtrack, and a trip to that dubious art orgy called Burning Man. But Tapert’s interview footage steals the show—the woman has gone so far out on a limb to explore her sexuality that it is an unexpected pleasure to watch her come back again.

In her satirical fiction films, German director Doris Dörrie has long specialized in battles of the sexes, but lately Japanese culture has become her major theme. Dörrie takes it pretty seriously, as she demonstrates with this modestly enlightening documentary about American Zen master/master chef Edward Brown. A student of Suzuki Roshi (also Leonard Cohen’s teacher), Brown is a good-humored guy who can draw myriad parallels between cooking and Zen practice—and just as easily deny them. Filmed at Zen centers in California and Austria, Brown vividly recounts the turning points in his life, which include a trip to visit his bread-making aunt in D.C. when he was 10. (The path to satori begins with the rejection of Wonder Bread.) Dörrie talks to others about their food epiphanies but always returns to Brown, a man who can be reduced to tears by a battered teapot. Note to those who prefer the Food Network to the Four Noble Truths: Brown can really handle a blade.

Esther B. Robinson’s fascinating biography opens, a little misleadingly, with a phone message from a one-time habitué of Andy Warhol’s Factory who claims not to remember Danny Williams, the director’s uncle. Yet Robinson got interviews with nearly every relevant Factory veteran who’s still breathing, including John Cale, Chuck Wein, Brigid Berlin, Danny Fields, Billy Name, and Paul Morrissey, who vaguely admits to getting into a fistfight with Williams at a Velvet Underground gig in Chicago. (About sex? Drugs? No, electrical cables.) The movie tells three roughly parallel stories: Williams’ disappearance in 1966 while visiting his family in Massachusetts; his relationship, perhaps sexual, with the emotionally remote Warhol; and the posthumous discovery within Warhol’s cinematic archive of Williams’ distinctive and previously unknown films. Clips from those shorts are interspersed with contemporary interviews and archival footage, offering yet another vantage point on the much-documented yet still elusive Factory. Robinson recovers much of her uncle’s short and largely forgotten life, including his editing work for the Maylses brothers, yet Williams retains enough mystery to qualify as an exemplary Warhol acolyte.

The title of Mike Mills’ documentary is derived from the ad campaign mounted by Glaxo­SmithKline in 2000, when it became the first company to market antidepressants in Japan. The implication is that big pharma invented not just a market but also an illness when it began advertising chemical balms for utsu, the new Japanese term for depression. But the film doesn’t really pursue this analysis, settling instead for an easy strategy of observing four young Tokyo residents who use Paxil or similar drugs. One of them is Taketoshi, a gay masochist who wanders the streets in short-shorts and high heels and is sometimes pummeled on stage at S&M clubs. His eccentric story overwhelms the other three and stretches the definition of “depression.” (Taketoshi surely wasn’t Glaxo’s intended consumer.) The filmmakers fill the rest of this lackadaisical study with the usual views of trains, neon, and crowds and hang around Shibuya as if waiting for Scarlett Johansson to show up. There’s material here for an insightful study, but this movie is so flimsy, it’s almost depressing.

“Without trucks, America goes dead,” a driver comments in Big Rig, a somewhat meandering but always interesting look at the lives of truckers. “Nothing you eat, wear, drink, or drive hasn’t been on a truck.” Director Doug Pray interviews a handful of on-duty haulers as they cross the country and gab about their families, how they got into the job, and the long hours and dangers that come with it. The men and women included in the documentary are mostly charming—or at least have colorful backstories. But audiences may be most compelled by the gas burden they share with these subjects: Try not to gasp when one guy stops for a $366 fill-up. Because the drivers pay for their own fuel, the soaring prices are making the work even tougher in terms of hours spent versus money brought home. The most remarkable thing about the people profiled, though, is their relentless sense of optimism despite the hardships they choose to endure—it seems that breakdowns, accidents, racism, and other trials have merely made these drivers appreciate the positive things in life even more. “You know what the nice thing about it is?” one asks. “None of us is taking a dirt nap right now.”

In Nepal, some preadolescent girls are worshipped as “living goddesses,” incarnations of the fierce Teleju (aka Kumari or Kali). It’s a confusing business, as 8-year-old Sajani admits: “We are Buddhist girls, possessed by a Hindu goddess.” A deified girl must possess “32 perfections,” including “a moist tongue,” and her duties range from wearing elaborate makeup to faith healing. If Ishbel Whitaker’s film stopped there, it would be just a curiosity, although a very photogenic one, outfitted with ancient ritual, flickering candles, and a sumptuously red color scheme. Instead, the documentary broadens its focus to show the wider contradictions of Nepalese life and Buddhism. In 2005 and ’06, Maoist rebels undermine the king’s despotic rule, raising the possibility of a modernized Nepal. Yet amid the conflict, old traditions continue, some merely quaint but others brutal: During one festival, the king sacrifices 108 bulls and 108 goats, and Katmandu’s streets slosh with gore. From the rebels’ red banners to the prospect of Sajani’s first period—which will end her stint as a goddess—this is a story of primal blood. (Sajani will attend the showing.)

In 1937, invading Japanese soldiers descended upon the Chinese capital of Nanking, leading to one of World War II’s most horrific scenes. The infamous siege eventually claimed the lives of more than 200,000 civilians and left countless homeless, orphaned, or wounded. Nanking tells the story of these agonizing months through eyewitness accounts by survivors and archival footage, largely focusing on the story of the Western missionaries and businessmen who saved lives by establishing a 2-square-mile safe zone for Chinese civilians. Actors (Woody Harrelson and Mariel Hemingway among them) give voice to these individuals through staged readings drawn from letters and journal entries written during the siege. The performances are harrowing enough, but it’s the actual survivor stories that cut to the bone. Men and women weep while recounting the murder of their loved ones, the destruction of their homes, and the violent sexual abuse they suffered at the hands of Imperial Japanese soldiers. Nanking’s most disturbing and controversial moments come during a series of grim interviews with surviving Japanese soldiers. These men—all deep into old age—provide their accounts of the atrocities but show surprisingly little remorse, openly admitting heinous crimes. “The rape was not really good for anything,” admits one former soldier. “It’s not really good unless you’re both into it.” Dreadful yet unblinking moments like these allow Nanking some unique perspective on the scope of the siege, whose specifics are mired in debate and controversy to this day.

Fair wages and reasonable working hours are good. Therefore, sweatshops are bad. Any feeling human being would agree, right? Made in L.A. tells what director Almudena Carracedo apparently believes will be a universally sympathetic story, though it arrives at a time when illegal immigration has become a highly contentious issue. The film focuses on three undocumented women from Mexico and Central America who came to California hoping for more prosperous lives. They found jobs in the garment industry but soon were subjected to 12-hour days, take-home work, and incomes that were below minimum wage, when they got paychecks at all. The scenario was so prevalent that the Garment Worker Center was formed in order to educate immigrants about both English and their rights. The center became an especially important part in the women’s lives when someone discovered a retailer, Forever 21, via subcontractors, was giving them pennies per item. Made in L.A. then follows a three-year boycott of and lawsuit against the retailer. The power of organization and the temptation to give up are prevalent themes, and when workers tell their stories through tears, you may be quick to side with them. Anyone who’s not so enthusiastic about the idea of illegal workers, though, will certainly feel otherwise.

“Fuck you, LBJ!” chanted the hippies and yippies in Chicago’s Grant Park, blocks from the 1968 Democratic Party convention. Protest has become such a homogenized art form in the years since that you can’t blame writer-director Brett Morgen for harking back to that corrosive summer, when taking a tear-gas canister to the face was a badge of honor, and policemen delivered truncheon blows the way Realtors hand out business cards. From the maelstrom of angry bodies, authorities charged seven protesters—including future entrepreneur Jerry Rubin and future Jane Fonda husband Tom Hayden—with violating the Anti-Riot Act. The ensuing trial took place off-camera, but Morgen (co-director of the entertaining Robert Evans portrait, The Kid Stays in the Picture) has ingeniously re-created the proceedings through motion-capture animation and readings of court transcripts. The technique produces moments of delicious high comedy, particularly when Judge Julius Hoffman (voiced by Roy Scheider) explodes at the antics of defense attorney William Kunstler (Liev Schreiber), or when knee-jerk meditator Allen Ginsberg (Hank Azaria) lays down a basso continuo of “Om” over a storm of legal caterwauling. Deftly spliced with newsreel footage, these sequences embody the “total theater” principle of yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, “with everybody becoming an actor.” The only trouble with such an aesthetic, in real life as in documentaries, is its almost willful obscuring of the issues at stake. Watching Morgen’s movie, you’d never know that, behind all the guerrilla stagecraft, something serious was being debated and that, through the clouds of tear gas, America was being handed over to the Republican Party. The Chicago Seven still has some ’splainin’ to do.

Imagine, if you can, Battlefield Earth gone even more wrong. That’s essentially what you’ll witness in Audience of One, Michael Jacobs’ documentary chronicling the doomed big-screen project of Richard Gazowsky, a San Francisco Pentecostal minister. Gazowsky, initially a genial, apparently sane sort, didn’t see a movie until he was 40. A year later, he claims, God told him to make his own film. “I want you to be the Rolls-Royce of filmmaking,” the Lord said. Gazowsky’s pitch to his pocket-emptying parishioners? “Star Wars meets The Ten Commandments.” Oh yeah, and it was also to be the greatest movie ever made. With a Craigslist-assembled volunteer cast and crew and purportedly up to $200 million from German investors, the minister heads to Italy for the shoot, where everything proceeds to go wrong—while everyone remains certain that the Almighty will make things right. Audience of One captures a fascinating train wreck as Gazowsky delusionally responds to each setback—break-ins at the production’s San Francisco studio meant Hollywood was trying to steal his script, the threat of eviction when the funding doesn’t come through is God’s way of “testing the city,” and Satan, of course, is responsible for their electricity being cut off. Even more astonishing is the outlandish business plan Gazowsky later concocts for his church despite the absolute tanking of the film’s years-long production. (“Second wind! Second wind!” he has his flock chant.) It’s surprising, then, when the minister sums up his mission best: “You know what? Either it’s God [telling me what to do], or I’m crazy.” (Gazowsky will attend the showing.)

Kurt Cobain: About a Son is a soundtrack set to a movie. Director AJ Schnack took 25 hours’ worth of previously unreleased taped interviews between Cobain and journalist Michael Azerrad (author of Come as You Are: The Story of Nirvana), whittled them down to 97 minutes, and added images to his audio. The result is an infuriating dichotomy: Hearing the late frontman talk candidly about his parents, his health problems, and Nirvana’s success is undeniably a riveting, uniquely intimate experience. But it’s difficult to get over the fact that you’re not watching him on-screen. Schnack chose to film random scenes (some directly related to the topic, such as high school kids when Cobain speaks of his teen years) and strangers (most of them simply looking into the camera), with drawings occasionally added. You hear the singer’s words, but your mind is too busy yelling, “Who the hell are these people?” to focus on what’s being said. The tactic does pay off, however, near the end of the film: Finally, we see stills of Cobain as he and Azerrad are ending their phone conversation. His casual “goodbye” accompanies his famous, doleful face, and the specialness of what you’ve just heard gives your gut a twist.

When it comes to abortion, “Everybody is right.” That line, spoken by none other than Mr. Liberal Pillar himself, Alan Morton Dershowitz, just—poof—softly floats to the ground about midway through Lake of Fire, Tony Kaye’s documentary about the Big Issue. Kaye’s professed goal of presenting a balanced portrait of abortion in America nearly 35 years after Roe v. Wade exists somewhere in that small moment, although it’s almost trampled by his efforts to give equal time—a lot of equal time in this three-plus-hour doc—to other big names. Interviews with and footage of Noam Chomsky, Paul Hill, Peter Singer, Alan Keyes, Norma “Jane Roe” McCorvey, Joycelyn Elders, Randall Terry, Pat Buchanan, Nat Hentoff—should I go on?—shuffle in and out of the film. Many of the subjects say, and often shout, what you expect from their respective side of the divide. Still Kaye, who’s clearly drawn to sticky issues (American History X is his other baby), takes in both the talkers and the shouters in a relatively unbiased way, shooting it all stylishly in black and white. If he ends up going a half-hour too long, if he ends up just too in love with some of his tape—well, it took him 15 years to make this film, and he’s put a lot of thought into it. And the film has many moments worth lingering on, notably those involving women who’ve struggled with their decisions, some of them speaking eloquently and painfully with their backs to the camera. “This is a question impossible to answer in the abstract,” says Dershowitz, who can now add a new title to his lengthy resume: the Buddha of Lake of Fire.

Street-corner visionaries who spew anti-government rhetoric are often uninspiring—whether they endorse anarchy or Armageddon, they depend on the same power grid and public transportation system as high school principals and neighborhood association presidents. But the paranoid/resourceful pioneers in Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa scratch out an existence on the Mesa, 15 desolate square miles of electricity-free New Mexico desert, and they offer a more compelling, crazier version of what unbridled freedom really means. When they’re not too busy torching abandoned cars or shooting AK-47s, this motley crew of marijuana farmers, burned-out hippies, and war veterans chase a Puritan ideal of claiming the American wilderness as the last place on earth where you can do whatever the fuck you want. To their credit, brother-and-sister directors Jeremy and Randy Stulberg don’t dwell on the seamier sides of this proposition, which include the failure to pay child support, PTSD, and alcoholism. Instead, their film looks for the good reasons a human being might decide to live as far away from other human beings as possible. It’s hard to be cynical about Stan, the Mesa’s wizened pig farmer who, when not feeding his animals, waters his animals, sheds tears over his long-dead animals, and puts up teenage runaways. The man’s worldview might be unreconstructed (and the anarchist group Black Bloc has better fashion sense), but it’s not pathological—he’s technically homeless but not without a home. Shot against a breathtaking Southwestern backdrop, Off the Grid makes a compelling case for a Disunited State of Nature.

In February 2006 the new Palestinian legislature opened, and one official sent televised greetings to its members who were behind bars—14 of them. The “hothouse” of this ideologically knotty film’s title is the Israeli prison system, in which radical Palestinian politicos organize and educate themselves for the future. (College-level courses are available, but only in Hebrew.) Like the Irish Republican Army members they resemble, the prisoners can legitimately be termed “freedom fighters” or “terrorists”—or both. Director Shimon Dotan is remarkably even-handed, never denying the Palestinians their intelligence, their conviction, or their sense of humor. Yet the prisoners’ humanity is fortified with fierce extremism, as is most clear in the women’s quarters. One smiling former newscaster is clearly delighted that she was able to report on a pizza-parlor bombing that she helped plan; she doesn’t flinch when she learns how many children died in the blast. If Hothouse demonstrates how Israeli prisons further the Palestinian cause, it also shows that many of their “political” inmates eminently deserve their life sentences.

The colorful masks, the high-­flying moves, the disgrace of having one’s secret identity revealed before a cheering crowd—luchadores, aka Mexican wrestlers, have long captured the country’s fascination. But can they also solve its problems? Arturo Perez Torres’ documentary Super Amigos follows five “social wrestlers” who use what meager fame and fortune they’ve achieved to help cure society’s various ills. The potbellied Super Barrio, Defender of Poor Tenants and the Nightmare of Voracious Landlords, is hard to take seriously as he visits a family’s apartment in full costume and offers advice on how to stall their imminent eviction. But when his efforts end up saving 22 families from being kicked out of their building, it becomes apparent that at least one of these guys has his shit together. If only Torres’ film wasn’t such a mess. The comic-book-style animated segments that introduce each wrestler’s origin detract from their already limited credibility with the audience; the clumsily shot and edited interviews offer little insight into the protagonists’ motivations, and the triumphant achievements that should be the climax of each wrestler’s activist mission mostly come across as sadly ineffective gestures. At the end of the day, all the pink-jumpsuit-sporting Super Gay has accomplished is marching in a gay pride parade; poor Ecologista Universal, meanwhile, spends eight days making a 200-mile trek from Michoacan to Mexico City just to chastise Wal-Mart employees for selling live Christmas trees. There’s no denying that the economical, sociological, and environmental issues depicted in Super Amigos plague Mexico. But Torres’ film does little to prove that the men behind the masks are any more capable of fixing the problems than anyone else.

David Sington’s In the Shadow of the Moon would feel right at home at the National Air and Space Museum: Like the institution’s aging installations and artifacts, Sington’s documentary is the kind of thing you’ve seen over and over again but that never ceases to inspire a sense of awe. Composed almost entirely of talking-head interviews with surviving members of Project Apollo—including Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, but not Neil Armstrong—and historic footage from both pre-launch testing as well as the actual missions, the film follows Apollo from its birth in the early ’60s to its final mission in ’72. It’s easy material to work with—if anything, Sington’s sole problem is that he has too much footage. With so many former astronauts offering their perspectives on the program’s various missions, comments regarding one mission are often heard over footage from a completely different one, which can get confusing. The film also takes an oddly aggressive turn during the credits, when several of the interviewees bitterly denounce conspiracy theorists who claim that the lunar landings never occurred. Such minor nuisances have little negative effect, however, since the story pretty much tells itself. Even by the standards of today’s technology, the concept of putting a few men into a rocket-propelled tin can, blasting them into outer space, and expecting them to survive not only a lunar landing but a return trip to Earth remains a true marvel. And, if we can put a man on the moon, it should come as no surprise that Sington can assemble a compelling documentary out of overly familiar parts.

Encountering a curious Iranian émigré at the grave of his favorite Farsi author, Heddy Honigmann explains that she’s making “a film about the importance of art in life.” Since this is literally a movie about Paris’ Père-Lachaise Cemetery, the director’s description initially seems disingenuous. But damned if she isn’t telling the truth. Honigmann features a few women who attend to their husbands’ tombs, a cemetery tour guide who discusses changing customs of death, and monuments to deported Jews who were murdered far from their Paris homes. (Plus, of course, a little chatter about the place’s most infamous resident, Jim Morrison.) Yet Honigmann, who has movingly considered the power of music and memory in such films as Crazy, is especially drawn to the crypts of people like Ingres, Wilde, Apollinaire—and to the people who are drawn to them. From the Japanese pianist who communes with her dead father by playing Chopin to the eager Proust fan who extols the author’s mastery in (unsubtitled) Korean, Forever does indeed illustrate the importance of art in life.

One thing becomes obvious while watching Ben Niles’ Note by Note (The Making of Steinway L1037): The workers at Steinway’s Queens manufacturing facility aren’t the dudes cutting your lumber at Home Depot. This documentary follows the birth of the titular piano to its finished state. It takes nearly a year, and the process, if not the entire film, is remarkable. Impossibly adhering to the company’s 154-year tradition of handcrafting each instrument, today’s Steinway employees are masters of precision—“Even one-hundredth of an inch makes a difference”—carving carefully selected wood often by freehand and tuning the pianos in each of several stages by ear. Much of Note by Note is simply quiet observation of the work performed on the L1037, and there is a point when the reverence that Niles seems to be demanding as his camera takes the factory in gets a bit tiresome. Smartly, though, he breaks up the monotony with stories about the employees and footage of concert pianists who visit Steinway’s basement to choose their instruments. The interview subjects—which include Harry Connick Jr., Hank Jones, and Marcus Roberts, among other musicians—agree that each piano has a personality, and each will speak to a different player. The artistry on display here, however, is what makes Note by Note truly compelling despite its lags. As one worker remarks, “This is nothing like nailing 2-by-4s.”

How many pop stars does it take to make a music documentary? Sixteen: One to produce the film, and 15 more to eat up screen time with banal and obvious praises. That’s the case with this David Bowienfunded Scott Walker bio. Here, Jarvis Cocker recounts the time he came down with the flu and wound up listening to Scott 3 for the first time. There, three-fourths of Radiohead discuss seeing the reclusive crooner riding on a bike. The Thin White Duke himself regales the audience with tales of dating one of the balladeer’s ex-girlfriends. But 30 Century Man makes surprisingly little room for Walker himself. An American who attained British superstardom in the ’60s as a member of the teen-pop group the Walker Brothers, Walker later floundered into a fascinatingly bizarre solo career that included everything from Jacques Brel covers to 10-minute-plus industrial grinders complete with operatic vocals. In the process, Walker lost a lot of everyday fans but apparently gained more than a few famous admirers—many of whom crowd this documentary with the kind of self-indulgent storytelling that’s usually reserved for Walker’s records. However, 30 Century Man is enjoyable in that it demystifies Walker, if only slightly. In footage shot during the recording of his 2006 album, The Drift, Walker is far from the gloomy and menacing figure one anticipates. Instead, he’s a soft-spoken 60-something man in a baseball cap who laughs gently—even as he coaches a percussionist on how to hammer a side of beef with his fists for a song about the execution of Benito Mussolini.

One of the stars of Frank and Cindy, Frank Garcia, was bassist for the ’80s band OXO. What? Don’t remember him? Hairier, fatter, and using coffee cans as an improvised toilet, you probably wouldn’t recognize him even if you did. And that’s the point, or at least it was when G.J. Echternkamp started making a movie about his parents. He wanted to mock his lowlife alcoholic stepfather, but Cindy Brown, who married Frank during the height of his 15 minutes, ends up stealing most of the spotlight. That’s partially because Frank isn’t as interested in helping G.J. out with his “project”—most of which ended up airing on the TV version of This American Life—but he does come around once he’s got a couple of bottles of wine in him. Still, this isn’t Intervention, folks. Cindy, off the sauce for five years, reveals that for most of the filming, unbeknownst to the filmmaker, she’s been popping pills and swears her life will be different once she gets replacements for some of the teeth she’s missing. G.J. offers to write the check, but through this often hilarious portrait of one weird family, it’s clear that neither Frank nor Cindy is interested in changing. And by the end, you’re just not sure you’d want them to.

Two Fugazi allies—Dutch punk quintet the Ex and Instrument director Jem Cohen—rendezvous at New York’s Knitting ­Factory for this concert-film-plus. Divided roughly in half between color and black-and-white, the movie presents an hour-length Ex set, interspersed with Cohen’s trademark shots of street scenes and vapor trails. It’s September 2004, and the Republicans are having their national convention in midtown, which gives a certain pertinence to such scratchy-funk Ex rants as “Henry K.” Still, this is mostly a record of a performance, and as such is designed only for Ex (and Cohen) fans. Mousetrap shows with two Cohen shorts, NYC Weights and Measures and Blessed Are the Dreams of Men; the first provides more impressionistic glimpses of Manhattan, while the latter, shot from inside a bus, could be described as a “music video”—albeit one without a promotional agenda.