Koki Maeda, left, and Ohshiro Maeda in I WISH (Magnolia Pictures)

Never for a moment did I think that the two boys at the heart of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s simply told and layered film I Wish were actors. Granted, they are real-life brothers, and they were bound to have brought something of that relationship to the fictional scenario (hey, whatever works). Yet the pre-adolescent Maeda brothers are show biz pros—in Japan they are known as comedians. But the sense that you’re watching a film naturally unfold at its own pace and tempo, like a documentary, continues even when the adult members of Kore-eda’s impressive repertory of actors make an appearance. They’re not intruders; they blend right in. Two of them starred in another beautiful family drama of his, Still Walking, and he also directed a then-14-year-old Yuya Yagira in a Cannes-winning role in the tragic kids-centric Nobody Knows. Kore-eda is a true actor’s director.

Scenes unhurriedly and organically unfold around the lives of a fractured family. Perhaps best of all, this truthful depiction of preadolescence refrains from overlaying the film with lessons.  Koichi (Koki Maeda) lives with his mother and his grandparents in Kagoshima, under the shadow of the ash-spewing volcano Sakurajima. (Koichi can’t figure out why everyone in the city is calm at the not-so-remote possibility of death and destruction). His younger brother Ryu (Ohshiro Maeda), short for Ryunosuke, has moved away to live with their dad 380 miles away in Fukuoka. Though he’s older, 12-year-old Koichi is not as independent as Ryu. Koichi is the one to reach out to his brother and make the daily cell phone calls. Though he has new friends and a paternal teacher, he clings to the hope that his divorced parents will get back together and all four will return to a life in Osaka. But interestingly, that doesn’t necessarily make him the more sensitive of the two.

You’ll have no trouble telling apart the brothers’ parallel storylines—the change in tempo in each is set by the boys’ rhythms. Whereas Koichi is quiet and dutiful, Ryu barrels through the film. Watching him is so energizing it’s like drinking a 16-ounce coffee with an extra shot of espresso. He’s in a state of perpetual motion. Without a doubt, he’s the natural ringleader among his friends, and unlike the older Koichi and his prepubescent pals, girls are allowed into Ryu’s club.

After school, Ryu dashes down the city streets on the way home, where he, in a moment of calm, eats his takeout order alone—having the house to himself suits him fine; his family memories differ from Koichi’s. Realistic and pragmatic, he remembers the folks fighting at the dinner table and his mother’s volatility. Now living with his wannabe rock star dad, he grows his own garden and runs the household. He’s the early bird who wakes a hung-over dad in the morning.

Rumor has it among Koichi’s friends that if you make a wish at the exact moment that the two new bullet trains connecting Kagoshima and Fukuoka speed by each other, your wish will come true.  For Koichi, that would be for the volcano to erupt, destroying the city and forcing his mom to take dad back. (In fact, the film’s Japanese title means “miracle.”) Ryu agrees to his brother’s plan to skip school and take the train out to the boonies to see him, but only out of obligation. His friends even write a script for him so he knows what to say to Koichi; he knows his brother wants the family back together, but he likes taking care of his dad in Fukuoka. But back to the scheme, how will the brothers and their friends pay for the train trip? Or explain to their parents where they’ve been overnight?

Maybe the view of childhood here is idyllic; there’s no Internet, video games, or Amber alerts. Remarkably, there’s a sense of communal responsibility for children that would be suspect, at least in most American cities. Opening your door to a group of unfamiliar kids would be preceded with caution in our world, but not necessarily in Kore-eda’s. Compared to American kids, whose schedules are so micro-managed with little time for independence, those of I Wish run wild and free. Nevertheless, adolescents will identify with either brother or their friends, each with his/her own aspiration, and adults will be more attuned to the film’s diffused point of view and observational tone. I Wish follows another strong film this spring, Monsieur Lazhar, whose appeal also breaks down age barriers.

Sophie Quinton in NOBODY ELSE BUT YOU (Jean-Claude Lother/First Run Features)

She might be the guiding spirit behind the fictional Broadway musical that’s the subject of the television drama Smash, but the last place you’d expect to find Marilyn Monroe is in a dreary French town in winter. But that’s where she is—sort of, in the French thriller Nobody Else but You, in the form of actress Candice Lecoeur (played with gleeful abandon by Sophie Quinton), an M. M. lookalike whose regional success as the face of a local cheese was her high watermark as a celebrity.

It’s not a spoiler to note that the movie—which is narrated by Candice—begins with the discovery of her lifeless body in the snow, witnessed by David Rousseau (an amusingly befuddled Jean-Paul Rouve), who just happens to be driving past as the authorities take her away. David, an author of popular crime novels with a bad case of writer’s block, becomes fascinated by Candice’s case—her death is ruled a suicide—and he begins snooping around the provincial town she lived and died in.

David discovers more than the local cops (who have their own secrets) about the circumstances surrounding Candice’s demise. He reads her diaries, talks to her hair stylist, and even gets her psychiatrist to share intimate details. Needless to say, he uncovers facts about her affairs, career, depression that allow her existence to become clearer in his mind, especially when he attends her memorial service and meets other important players in her fatally melodramatic life.

Don’t let the review blurbs comparing this to the Coen brothers and David Lynch make you think that Nobody Else but You is Fargo or Twin Peaks revisited (the original French title, Poupoupidou, more directly makes the Marilyn connection). Rather, writer-director Gérald Hustache-Mathieu stakes out his own skewered territory with greyish—rather than black—humor, like with the cherished pet that David’s aunt bequeaths to him—unfortunately, it’s dead and stuffed—or the jokey musical cues. “California Dreamin’” (José Feliciano’s slowed down cover version) plays along during a car ride through a wintry landscape.

At times, Hustache-Mathieu relies too heavily on cuteness, as when Candice warbles “Happy Birthday, Mister President” to a local (and very married) political leader a la Marilyn in a very public setting, or when his protagonists “meet” fancifully (which uncomfortably reminded me of a similar fantasy moment in Madonna’s misbegotten W. E.). But the director redeems himself with a surprising semi-twist ending that cleverly ties together the various loose ends of David and Candice’s unconsummated relationship.

Egon Schiele's PORTRAIT OF WALLY, 1912 (The Leopold Museum)

Portrait of Wally is a real-life thriller that starts out as an historical legacy from the Holocaust, then ratchets up into a contemporary scandal with rich villains suavely sure they can outlive the people they cheated.

The story would be less fascinating if it was only about the recovery of a beautiful painting seized by Nazis as they ran over Europe’s cultural heritage, wholesale thefts memorably outlined in the documentary The Rape of Europa (2006). But from the time Jewish gallery owner Lea Bondi fled Vienna in 1939 to London after the forced sale of her collection, she tried to track what happened to her favorite painting, Egon Schiele’s 1912 portrait of his lover Walburga Neuzil. Bondi, one of the few champions of the Austrian artist (who died of the flu in 1928), kept writing until her death in 1969 for help in finding her missing piece.

While her family continued the search for decades, Schiele’s creations have been fetching up to $40 million into the 21st century. This documentary suspensefully mounts evidence that the same collectors who basked in the reflected glory of the rising value of Schiele’s works set up an elaborate conspiracy to keep secret how this work was obtained, manipulated the art historical records to cover it up, and then dragged out an unprecedented U.S. government lawsuit for 13 years that finally wrangled acknowledgement of the family’s rights.

Director Andrew Shea zags between duplicity on two parallel trails: the postwar acquisition of the portrait by Nazi collaborators in Austria, and the legal fight when it was exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1997 and blocked from leaving the country. They share a link, Austrian Rudolf Leopold, who amassed the world’s largest private collection of Schiele’s work, with the complicity of the Austrian government. He wrote a self-serving catalogue raisonné to make his version of the chain of ownership accepted historical fact—even as Bondi asked for his help to recover her painting from a country she had no wish to ever see again. Descendants of Bondi and her allies, a whistleblowing art dealer, prosecutors, and journalists help to uncover more and more details behind the glittering cocktail parties of the wealthy, while never losing sight of the difficult circumstances of Schiele and the woman who loved looking at Portrait of Wally in her living room.

One journalist, the film’s co-writer David D’Arcy, alleges that his dogged reporting on how major American museums ganged up against the lawsuit led to the end of his career with National Public Radio. Even as he trumpets his vindication, the film acts too shocked, shocked to discover the conflicted interests of rich entrepreneurs who are also nonprofit museum board members, a connection already excoriated in Don Argott’s Art of the Steal (2009). But the position of Ronald Lauder against the return of the painting to its original owner’s estate does seem particularly dubious. He’s a leading collector of Austrian art for his own museum (for which he purchased the returned Klimt portrait featured in The Rape of Europa), and chairman of both MoMA and the Commission for Art Recovery, which lobbies and litigates for the return of art that Nazis stole from Jews. (He declined to be interviewed for the film.)

The case was an important precedent to put teeth into the focus on looted art, and not just from the Nazi era, while exposing the questionable practices of international collectors, dealers, and museums. However, the documentary only alludes to those broader ramifications with confusing montages of headline accusations against the Getty and other institutions, without explaining the expanded Art Loss Register that now tracks all kinds of stolen art. (A panel discussion following the film’s world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival dealt with some of these larger issues.)

One of the many queasy ironies is the grin on the face of Leopold’s widow as she welcomes the portrait back to her husband’s government-supported museum, brushing aside the $19 million he finally agreed to pay in 2010 to settle the case and the mandated exhibit label about its true history. That becomes just so much small print compared to the palette of issues this portrait of a beautiful, mysterious woman has stirred up.

Nadine Labaki and Julien Farhat in WHERE DO WE GO NOW? (Rudy Bou Chebel/Sony Pictures Classics)

Where Do We Go Now? is about as feel-good a fable set in the Middle East as can be imagined. Infused with music and magic realism, a female narrator introduces it with “I’m going to tell you a little story” as a large procession of women in black sway and stomp like an active Greek chorus, reflecting the Aristophanes’ Lysistrata-like resonance in the tale. When they reach the village cemetery, they split into the Christian and Muslim sections to clean up gravestones with photographs of too many young men and boys. This locale is similar to the unspecified, yet Lebanon-like war-torn country of Denis Villeneuve’s far more grim Incendies from last year.

Back in the village, bounded by a mosque and a church, the men are hanging around the tavern. The only guy working hard there is the handsome Muslim painter, Rabih (Julien Farhat). The most beautiful Christian woman in town, the waitress Amale (director and co-writer Nadine Labaki), can’t help but notice him. Both bound by tradition, they can only be discreetly romantic in a lovely musical number dancing together, but only in their imaginations. (The terrific rhythmic music is by Labaki’s husband, Khaled Mouzanar.)

The village boys scamper around, setting up satellite TV that links the village to the outside world. They also smuggle goods along a precipitous path to avoid the hidden land mines that wandering goats occasionally set off. This limited contact is enough to bring in hints that the civil war has once again broken out, and the women spontaneously decide that the key in keeping their male population safe is to block out news of the renewed fighting. From first burning newspapers to blocking channels, their efforts  humorously escalate to emphasize the men’s foibles, including hiring imported sexy Russian dancers as a distraction.

As the outside dangers are brought home by injuries to the daring boys, the dancers see that the photographs on the graves are the same ones that fill shrines in each home, and, in female solidarity, they help the women stage the ultimate strike against religious differences to prove that people really are the same. Female-centric like Labaki’s first film Caramel (2007), it’s as rich in sympathetic, individual characters, but funnier, albeit a bit over the top and satirically absurd, (there’s a fake religious miracle). Labaki demonstrates that there is hope to look beyond endless conflict, even if it is wishful thinking about an uncertain future.

Thomas Brodie Sangster as Donald in DEATH OF A SUPERHERO (Donald Clarke)

Before all you fanboys and fangirls watch on-demand this potential indie alternative to The Avengers, you should know that this movie isn’t exactly a lot of ”fun.” The word “death” before “superhero” gives much more of an indication where this is heading. It’s not about an actual superhero, per se, but an Irish teenager (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) dying of cancer. His anger pours out in his drawings filled with violence, death, and sex, and come to life in 2D animation. It’s his way to cope with the glaring fact that he’s going to perish.

The drama’s centered in some part around the boy’s relationship with his therapist, Dr. Adrian King, played by Andy Serkis, who like Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting, is comfortable in shaggy facial hair, wool sweaters, and also has a late wife who he misses very much. He’s also the best reason to see the film. Serkis, often so great in motion-capture performances (like in last year’s Rise of the Planet of the Apes and The Adventures of Tintin), takes on what is a more nuanced, intimately written role—a guiding light for young Donald. He never overplays a beat and registers so much sympathy and care for this boy that we do as well. (Brodie-Sangster is quite affecting as well.)

As for how the movie deals with cancer? Aside from the animated sequences (which sprout up based on how Donald is feeling at a moment), he misbehaves by vandalizing public property, which gets him suspended from school. The drawings Donald makes could be considered by some generic—same ol’ guys with big muscles bounding around and women in sexy lingerie in dark Frank Miller-esque settings, but that’s a male teenager for you. Yet the emotion behind the characters is what counts. The scene where his father and mother are told of their son’s worsening health is well done; there is not a word spoken as the news sinks in. Another Good Will Hunting touch is to give Donald a possible romantic interest (pretty Aisling Loftus), who first gravitates toward Donald because of his artistic talent. Some of their conversations are not totally convincing—at one point he praises her for “seeing the world in your own way”—but by the end their relationship has gone through its ups and downs without taking the expected route.

Tomer Sisley, left, and Julien Boisselier in SLEEPLESS NIGHT (Tom Stern)

Frédéric Jardin’s slickly shot and edited Sleepless Night is, thanks to its fast pace and vivid characters, most likely the next American remake lying in wait—not to mention that its setting and framework is familiar. Vincent, an undercover narcotics cop, pulls a drug heist with his crooked cop partner: stealing a lucrative bag of cocaine meant for nightclub owner/gangster José Marciano (Serge Riaboukine). In retaliation, Marciano kidnaps Vincent’s teenaged son as leverage to get the drugs back, and then the majority of events take place all in one night at Marciano’s nightclub.

The main performance by Tomer Sisley as Vincent is entirely convincing (in a Die Hard-esque move, Vincent is stabbed early on and remains wounded throughout the film, which adds to the suspense). Most of the characterizations are the kind out of a 1940’s film noir on steroids, with some added international flair. It’s not just French gangsters vs. cops. Some of bad guys are from the Caribbean, Corsica, and Turkey, adding to some cultural tension when one set of gangsters clashes with another at the club to retrieve the drugs. Though some, like Marciano, are fairly one note.

The camerawork isn’t quite like a “Bourne” movie, but it’s close. Luckily the editing isn’t quite as jarringly hyperkinetic; you can still see what happens when fights and action goes down. The pacing is fast enough that I was never bored, but I also found myself counting minutes until the next twist would pop up. Sleepless Night has several, and by the last 10 minutes I stopped really caring about the story and just kept paying attention to how a shot was framed or to the choreography of a fight scene.

The best part in the film is when Vincent is caught in cat-and-mouse game with the gangsters—he hides the drugs within the club and then those same drugs are re-hidden by someone else. Most amusing is a chase while clubbers are all dancing in an electric glide formation to Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.” The film has an edge and built-in suspense, almost like a Michael Mann film, but it becomes totally perfunctory, and there isn’t much depth to its story, apart from the relationship between Vincent and his son.

Miss India contestants in THE WORLD BEFORE HERE (Storyline Entertainment)

Socially conscious documentaries at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival perceptively examined female roles and the culture wars, and brought well-deserved attention to unconventional heroes.

Nisha Pahuja’s The World Before Her, the festival’s Best Documentary Feature winner, adds considerable depth to the usual superficial contrasts of Indian women as either Bollywood stars or slumdogs. The beautiful contestants in the Miss India competition at first seem like manipulated Barbie dolls on an assembly line, but interviews gradually reveal individuals. The fundamentalist Hindus violently protesting against such beauty pageants run summer camps under their Durga Vahini women’s division, shown here on film for the first time, that militantly drill girls in conservative values and self-defense (some say aggression) against Western ideas. Interviews with enthusiastic participants bring out the contradictions for girls caught between the movement’s conflicting messages of empowerment and subservience to rigid patriarchy. (The documentary also provides corroborating factual context about women’s difficulties within modernizing India seen in Michael Winterbottom’s tragic romance Trishna.)

Sharing parallel themes with World, directors Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus look at the impact of heightened sexualized pop culture in the U.S., particularly online, in Sexy Baby. In addition to jocular teen-boys-on-the-street interviews, three females are intensively followed. Two are annoying TV clichés; a young woman who seems like she’s trying out for an exhibitionist reality series and a precocious teen straight out of Gossip Girl’s Manhattan. However, the unique viewpoint of a former adult film star, known as Nakita Kash, is clear-eyed and insightful about the pressures of reality vs. fantasy. Christian Bonke and Andreas Koefoed’s Ballroom Dancer, the winner of a  Special Jury Mention, subtly observes the distance between real and manufactured romance in sexy Latin dance competitions. Slavik, an aging but still ultra perfectionist Ukrainian Gypsy dancer, loses first one, then another, life/dance partner as he strives for a comeback championship.

The lines are dramatically drawn at the Texas State Board of Education in The Revisionaries. Director Scott Thurman is scrupulously fair in presenting (earnest) liberals and (personable) conservatives as three-dimensional people with passionate and fully thought-out opposing opinions about religious values in public schools. Board member elections and voting decisions set the standards for science and history textbooks in Texas, which heavily influence school district purchases throughout the country. Awarded another Special Jury Mention, this stimulating documentary feels like you’re watching the famous 1925 Scopes Trial, taking place, however,  in the here and now.

Évocateur: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie is a fascinating look at how divisive political controversies were first stirred up as entertainment for television ratings in the late 1980s, decades before Glenn Beck. It tracks the surprising rise and precipitous fall of the son of a famous crooner who summered next to the Kennedys, interned in Teddy’s senate office, and wrote soul-baring songs and poetry. He then transformed into a fire breathing dragon of finger-pointing, right-wing, working-class discontent in a syndicated TV talk show, taped before a loud studio audience of rabid Jersey fans (that included directors Seth Kramer, Daniel A. Miller, and Jeremy Newberger). An astonishing sample of clips, including previously unseen footage from when the cameras kept running during commercials, not only demonstrate how Downey theatrically planned to push guests’ buttons, but display a now familiar panoply of pundits before they knew how to keep their cool on TV, including Pat Buchanan, Herman Cain, and Alan Dershowitz. Not among those willing to review this learning experience is the Rev. Al Sharpton, whose on-air accusations about a controversial police case brought notorious publicity at the expense of an innocent cop, who for the first time tells his side.

Booker’s Place: A Mississippi Story movingly delves into how TV’s treatment of political issues can have a lasting and unexpected impact on the people involved. Frank De Felitta’s NBC News report Mississippi: A Self-Portrait hadn’t been publicly seen since 1966 until his filmmaker son Raymond posted it online. That let Yvette Johnson finally see a legendary moment in her African-American family, when her grandfather Booker Wright astoundingly chose to voice on camera his frank testimony about being a waiter at a whites-only restaurant in Greenwood. Raymond and Yvette go back and interview whites and blacks (as well as the lively nonagenarian Frank) about the past, the consequences of the national spotlight, and the town’s uneasy adjustments to change. The community and the families ponder the resonance of editorial choices in making a documentary. Booker’s Place is also being shown at Tribeca on Demand, and NBC’s Dateline will revisit the footage later this month.

High Tech, Low Life salutes idealism in using modern media to promote political change, and is of immediate relevance with the Chinese government’s crackdown on activists. Director Stephen Maing tracked two citizen reporters, who find idiosyncratic ways around China’s Great Firewall to reach their online readership. To conduct unique reporting on community complaints, “Zola” uses humor and his youthful high spirits to deflect the serious images he posts on such issues as residential displacement, while “Tiger Temple” uses his travels on a bicycle as a cover for photographing the forgotten people in cities and polluted rural areas. Their optimism is as impressive as their determination.

The List spotlights an inspirational, noncombatant American war hero. Kirk Johnson idealistically left the Midwest to join American agencies reconstructing Iraq and Afghanistan, and then was shocked to discover that the indispensable local translators helping him and other Americans were, first, targeted for assassination (with their families), and then were stalled from fleeing to safety in the U.S. as refugees. He compiled their names into a (growing) list of cases and organizes legal assistance. Director Beth Murphy balances what comes close to an over-emphasis on a handsome, monastically driven, white savior by also following several Iraqis from their work in Baghdad’s Green Zone to temporary exile among other Iraqi refugees flooding neighboring countries. The world premiere was followed by a discussion on the status of asylum seekers and the posttraumatic stress they share with military veterans.

The single screening of Once Upon a Lullaby was enough to clear away cynicism or depression from any other documentary in this or any other festival. Subtitled The PS 22 Chorus Story, you may have seen the diverse Staten Island fifth graders’ videos on YouTube or their grand finale performance at the 2011 Academy Awards. Director Jonathan Kalafer, a public school teacher, emphasizes the educational focus and personal impact of exuberant chorus teacher Gregg Breinberg that warmly grounds the kids to be true to the love of music he joyously imparts.

A scene from Robert Lepage's DAS RHEINGOLD (Ken Howard)

During its final days, the Tribeca Film Festival world premiered three New York-centric fine arts documentaries. The most penetrating of the trio, Wagner’s Dream is an engrossing look behind the curtain of the Metropolitan Opera, and is the perhaps best film about that art form, fictional or otherwise, though it may have that field all to itself. Saturated with excerpts from the sumptuous score of Richard Wagner’s “Ring des Nibelungen,” it will wear down any resistance to the composer or to sitting through his four-part, 16-hour-long saga of gods and greed. In the process, the Met has received something in exchange for opening its backstage to director Susan Froemke. Her film’s an effective promotional piece for the venerable company—you see how the sausage is made, so to speak—and it offers more than enough opportunities for general manager Peter Gelb and stage director Robert Lepage to staunchly defend their new technically complicated, $16 million production, which has received mostly spotty reviews. Yet the company deserves credit for allowing Froemke to air some of the criticism heaped on the hyped production and to film its mishaps, both technical and man-made.

The film succeeds in making even an opera novice care about whether the new production succeeds with audiences or if it will help bring in a new and younger demographic to the house. The backbone of Lepage’s “Ring” Cycle rests on a 45-ton apparatus, dubbed the “machine,” made up of 24 side-by-side planks revolving from an axis, upon which are projected video imagery triggered by the singers’ movements and vocal interactions. The aluminum-and-fiberglass planks move every which way (sometimes with a thud or two), shifting the setting from the bottom of the Rhine to the mountaintop playground of the gods.

After a dry first half-hour, the film takes flight, moving from the machine’s technical testing ground in Quebec to the Met, where the singers square off against their computer-run stage partner. Among the singers, Froemke judiciously zooms in on soprano Deborah Voigt as her main focus. It’s the first time Voigt has ever sang the vocally challenging lead role of Brünnehilde, and she’s completely upfront before the camera, and of all of the cast members, Voigt faces the most physical obstacles on the steeply raked set.  Unfortunately, some of the best singers/actors today are not seen at all, tenor Jonas Kaufmann among them.

“Ring” first-timers will get the gist of the densely layered saga. Perhaps intentionally avoiding a can of worms, the film stays away from mentioning the incestuous union between twins Siegmund and Sieglinda, or from recounting Wagner’s biography and his controversial historical legacy—material enough for another film (or two).

The harshest criticism about Lepage’s “Ring” has been lobbied by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross, who has describe it as “Pound for pound, ton for ton, the most witless and wasteful production in modern operatic history.” (I’ve seen all four parts as they debuted, and that’s way too harsh an assessment.) During the orchestral preludes, the machine is the razzle-dazzle star, and the production design is quite beautiful, especially the ominous forest at the top of Die Walküre, and scenes with the agile Rhinemaidens nimbly utilize the raked planks. However, Fafner the dragon in Siegfried and the end-of-the-world climax in Götterdämmerung felt threadbare and thrown together.  For all of the technical, state-of the-art innovations, the overall production is quite tame compared to Francesca Zambello’s Americana “Ring” for San Francisco Opera last year, in which Siegfried was set in a post-apocalyptic 1950s wasteland.

But tellingly, nowhere in Dream will you find a rehearsal between the director and his singers/actors. Often it seemed as though they were just told where to stand. What the film can’t capture are the long stretches within the operas where the singers seemed trapped between the machine and the lip of the stage. (Since the premieres, blocking has been altered). That said, Siegfried featured Voigt’s best acting as the warrior goddess-turned-mortal Brünnehilde, and no one could ask for a better Albrecht (Eric Owens) or Fricka (Stephanie Blythe).

Commemorating the oldest American performing arts center’s sesquicentennial anniversary, BAM150 takes a slightly different approach than Wagner’s Dream. It’s more of a tribute than a dissection of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which in Michael Sládek’s documentary stands in for the entire borough. Originally situated in Brooklyn Heights, it was a challenge to neighboring Manhattan’s cultural dominance.  Edwin Booth, Eleonora Duse, Sarah Bernhardt, Mark Twain, Caruso—all have appeared on its stage. In its current Fort Greene neighborhood, BAM fell into hard, crime-ridden times and was almost razed in the 1960s. The programming of its former executive director, Harvey Lichtenstein, saved it. He offered an alternative to what could be found on the stages of Manhattan: the free love manifesto of the Living Theatre in 1968 (Lichtenstein promised the cops that no one would leave the theater nude), Robert Wilson, Steve Reich, and a who’s who of the cutting edge in theater. The film lets loose with a barrage of performance clips (Laurie Anderson, Pina Bausch, Mark Morris), though none of them have the lingering power of the leitmotifs from Wagner’s Dream. Appropriately for a film that’s probably most ideal for fund raising, BAM’s Executive Producer Joseph V. Melillo and President Karen Brooks Hopkins are co-producers.

Fortunately, the Tribeca screening of the affectionate and frank Joe Papp in Five Acts isn’t the only opportunity to see Tracie Holder and Karen Thorsen’s thoughtful portrait of the founder of Shakespeare in the Park (still free to the public after 50 years) and the Public Theater. Because of the tight 90-minute format, the filmmakers pack in a lot, offering a big picture and leaving it to biographies to fill in the details. For example, Meryl Streep describes Papp’s behavior as “brutal” and Roscoe Lee Brown calls him a “minor Fascist”—and you crave for more dirt.  It will air on PBS’s American Masters series in 2013 (so you have to be patient).

Juma Lonya Mwapitu in WAVUMBA (Jeroen van Velzen)

Documentaries about athletes and ruggedly macho jobs won awards at the 2012 Tribeca Film Festival and were also popular with audiences. In Wavumba (“they who smell of fish” in Swahili), Best New Documentary Director Jeroen van Velzen finds the spiritual aspects of traditional shark hunting off the coast of Kenya through shamans and the eyes and weathered hands of the old fisherman Masoud, who tries to pass on patience and appreciation for his ancestors to the younger, restless (and resentful) generation. Returning to the sites of beloved stories from his lonely youth, Velzen, who traveled four days from Lake Malawi in Africa to attend the festival, goes just beyond a nostalgic National Geographic-type travelogue to have us believe that we, too, can see what haunts the waters off the sacred island of Mpunguti.

The winner of the first audience award for best documentary, Tom Putnam and Brenna Sanchez’s BURN, follows a year-in-the-life of the Detroit Fire Department, the busiest in the nation. Its new chief takes a crash course in managing a drastically declining city with budget cuts and the consequences of a radical “let it burn” policy for the plague of vacant structures. Firefighters facing retirement and serious injury emotionally personalize the wider impact of the financial crisis on public employees and hard-hit cities. With Denis Leary on board as executive producer, the premiere generated proceeds for the Leary Firefighters Foundation to buy the gear that the Detroit crews sadly need.

The economic downturn, craggy fishermen, an ambitious entrepreneur, and stubborn politicians suspensefully figure in David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s timely Downeast, with women workers at a closed sardine cannery-turned-lobster processing plant caught in the middle in Prospect Harbor, ME. This sympathetic, experiential documentary (part one of a planned series) puts real facts, faces, and feelings onto the strident debates about factories, bank loans, and government assistance that are going on during the election season.

On the Mat, an involving, uncritical portrait of male high school sports won the Tribeca (Online) Film Festival Best Feature Film Award. Director Fredric Golding’s intimate tag-along with the Lake Stevens, WA, wrestling team frankly shows the peer pressures within a team sport structured around individual competitions. Actor/producer Chris Pratt, more known for TV’s Parks and Recreation than his fifth place finish in the state championship under this tough coach Brent Barnes, admiringly narrates and adds fond, personal reminiscences of learning “to be a man.” Originally planned as part of the True Life series on MTV, it proudly glorifies the torture on growing young bodies of extreme fasting and workouts to make a needed weight class. The tension builds as the long-haired nonconformist rebels against orders by swigging Gatorade and the 103-pound hero wrestles through a serious knee injury. With just glimpses of a proud or worried mother or a flirtatious cheerleader, gender comparisons are patently implicit even though there’s no whiff of introspective angst about body image, potential eating disorders or physical damage, compared to similar behavior by, say, female gymnasts.

Runner Hawii Megersa in TOWN OF RUNNERS (Jerry Rothwell)

Town of Runners is one of the few sports films since the festival’s inception that has focused on female athletes. Director Jerry Rothwell started trailing running coach Sentayehu Eshetu in poor, rural Ethiopia just when his protégés added long-distance Olympic gold medals to their other trophies. Then over several years he followed three students, two of them girls, who are determined to compete in order to find wider opportunities outside of their very limited social and educational options. But once the inspiring coach passes them on to the financially precarious Ethiopian sports bureaucracy, the context becomes more and more confusing and unclear about how the girls persevere to keep running despite all the broken promises.

More films by women filmmakers on women athletes are coming next year, according to the participants in the April 21st panel “ESPN Films: Beyond the Playing Field.” Libby Geist, head of documentary development for ESPN Films, described how she turned the network’s original concept for token recognition of this year’s 40th anniversary of Title IX, which required colleges receiving federal funds to provide parity for women’s sports, into support for a new Nine for IX series. Executive producer and Tribeca Festival co-founder Jane Rosenthal noted that the stories covered will include Venus Williams’ demand for equal prize money at Wimbledon and the career of Pat Summitt, the University of Tennessee basketball coach who recently retired after a diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Building on her experiences with the 2006 documentary Blindside about blind mountain climbers, director Lucy Walker enthused about filming the preparations of a variety of women Olympic athletes around the world, particularly the equestrians who compete directly with men. Director Amy Berg (Deliver Us From Evil, 2006) is impressed by the training of the competitors she is following for the first ever medal event for women boxers.

Conventional coverage of sports stars made for unusually disappointing world premiere entries in ESPN Films’ continuing 30 for 30 series, in honor of the network’s anniversary. Coodie and Chike’s Benji was this sidebar’s centerpiece. However, it doesn’t tap into the essence of the 1984 murder of high school basketball phenom Ben Wilson on the mean Chicago streets until a too-brief look at the perpetrators in the last few minutes.Billy Corben’s Broke, in the preliminary version screened here, was mostly a rehash of TV news and newspaper headlines on professional athletes gone wild with too much money too soon in life, supplemented by interviews with paunchy, older but wiser guys. The only new viewpoints were women bloggers shrewdly defending female fans who flirt with “ballers.”

Gerda and Kurt Tuchler, as seen in THE FLAT (Tuchler/Goldfinger family Collection)

Two engrossing North American premieres colorfully uncover forgotten complexities of Jewish life. In what could be a top contender in the world documentary competition, The Flat opens with an experience many folks can relate to. Director Arnon Goldfinger aims his camera as his family cleans out the overstuffed Tel Aviv apartment of his grandmother Gerda Tuchler, who had just died at 98. But while they empty out her shrine to the German fashion and culture she left behind in the early 1930s, Goldfinger, as the family historian, hunts through drawers and closets—and out comes a pile of old Nazi newspapers and years of correspondence. His mother Hannah reluctantly translates the distastefully favorable news account of her parents as tour guides for a notorious propaganda effort encouraging the exodus of German Jews to Palestine (in defiance of the colonial British administration). Goldfinger finds experts to explain the historical (and psychological) context, but also, amazingly, tracks down and visits the aristocratic German family from Gerda’s letters. In both families, descendants stay in emphatic denial despite gathered evidence from photographs, archives, and souvenirs that reveals a very unusual friendship persisting over decades amidst tragedies and lies. Even more than the extraordinary facts Goldfinger diligently discovers, the film poignantly captures how both families refuse to acknowledge how personal relationships challenge generalizations about history. Tantalizing questions still remain in all those garbage bags from the finally empty flat.

El Gusto rocks the casbah in the festival’s Viewpoints section. Several current films, including Ismaël Ferroukhi’s Free Men, have recalled that Jews played popular music along side Muslim musicians in Algeria before its independence from France in 1962. Director Safinez Bousbia tracks them down all over Algeria and France to tell their almost forgotten story of chaabi, a passionate hybrid that infectiously combined Andalusian, Berber, flamenco, and Arabic rhythms and instruments. The director finds not just rare archival footage and images but the now elderly raconteurs, who are thrilled to have an audience again. (They haven’t played publicly in decades). Bousbia vividly bring back to life the pleasures of their making music together. Like a Buena Vista Social Club in the casbah, Bousbia reunites the still spry performers for a joyous reunion and triumphant series of comeback concerts in a 42-member orchestra called El Gusto. (You can download a recording to keep on dancing).

The Virgin, the Copts and Me, in the world documentary competition, explores another lesser-known community in North Africa, the Coptic Christians of Egypt, but through the eyes of émigrés. Director Namir Abdel Messeeh travels from his home in secular France, curious to document the apparitions of the Virgin Mary that have over the years galvanized his minority community. Through an amusing series of financial and logistical travails, he ends up filming at his extended family’s rural home village—expressly against the wishes of his indomitable mother, even as she takes over as producer of his film. What seems like a long, drawn-out, artificial reconstruction of a miracle that the director doesn’t even believe in turns ad hoc into a surprising community bonding exercise between Muslims and Christians, young and old, émigrés and those left behind. The pull of the past and the draw of the future, and, most of all, the love of family, surmounts anything else going on in the country.

From South Korea, Planet of Snail is an unusually intimate portrait of a loving couple. Young-Chan is a tall, dark, and handsome poet, and has been deaf and blind since childhood. With beautiful long hair and infinite patience, Soon-Ho is tiny, bent over with a hunchback-like spinal disability. Director Seung-Jun Yi followed them daily for more than two years to provide sensitive insight into their challenges and their devotion. Shot in a determined but very empathetic cinema verité style, the audience only gradually gleans, with some frustration, bits of information about their background and their feelings through Young-Chan’s writings (like the titular metaphor). The couple communicates with a tactile system called “finger Braille,” and mutually support each other in every aspect of their lives, so closely that they face a crisis when they realize they need to practice functioning alone in case something happens to the other. After screening in the world documentary competition, Cinema Guild plans a theatrical release this summer. April 26, 2012

Based on one of those true stories that are memorable, but not exactly incredible, regional human interest writer Skip Hollandsworth’s 1998 Texas Monthly piece on Bernie Tiede provides the basis for this comedic drama. Bernie is a progressive, burrowing exploration of not merely the events of the story but of Bernie himself, revealing the man in a deliberately impartial way. He’s a charismatic yet flawed local hero, and it’s no surprise that Linklater—an intelligent, morally liberal wanna-be philosopher—would be drawn to this subtly compelling tale of an ostensibly “good” person who commits a grave mistake. The director of Slacker and The Waking Life brings his heady sociological sense to what is here a much more conventional film.

The great Shirley MacLaine is Marjorie Nugent, the unfriendly widow of a wealthy oil tycoon, with whom Bernie forges an unlikely bond. The duo start out as peas in a pod, going on trips together, attending social events until her eventual nastiness, which for a time Bernie must have turned a blind eye, gets the better of the sensitive man, and he shoots her in a moment of frustration and is subsequently charged with her murder.

Bernie is not a mystery, yet there is a long, slow tension that occurs due to the methodically revealed details of Bernie’s personality. It has an unlikely edge-of-your-seat feel. For the cinema-goer accustomed to easy interpretations, this might be a tough one to get into at first. Linklater, seemingly understanding this, allows a lot of casual time with Bernie at the top of the film, where not much seems to happen aside from a day in the life of the quaint but cultured East Texas town of Carthage. Linklater uses faux documentary interviews with townspeople (some played by actors), most of whom, having already disliked the old bat, defend Bernie to the end. One of the things that make this film so wonderfully complex is the variety of common opinions about Bernie, which range from the sympathetic townsfolk to the gregarious and suspicious D.A., nicely portrayed by Matthew McConaughey.

Jack Black is Bernie to the letter. Physically, this performance is no less than perfect. He sports high-waisted slacks and has the delicate posture of a vaguely effeminate Southern gentleman. Bernie walks daintily, holds his head high, and is often found singing at services as part of his responsibilities as assistant funeral director. Look, I knew Jack Black had pipes, but he’s uncannily good. My word. The biggest takeaway, though, is his ability to pull off this tightrope act. Let’s not forget Black was a talented character actor before we realized how hilarious he was. Black’s achievement here is in remaining perpetually likeable while always keeping something hidden behind those otherwise emotive eyes.

The film is about a lot of things, but community values are near the top of the list. Bernie is a do-gooder who spent a lot of Mrs. Nugent’s money on positive local projects, church renovations, and charity. The widow herself was a scrooge-like curmudgeon whose home office featured a prominent oil painting of, yes, Texas oil fields. On whether it’s wrong to spend someone else’s money, the film (and the Carthage residents) seem content to hold discourse on the distribution of wealth rather than the base details of the actual criminal charges. Bernie’s crime is not the issue for most of the townsfolk. For them, his intentions are on trial.

The film appeals both to the heart and the head. Bernie may have had more success with the former, but Linklater does a fine job with both here, offering a film you can’t walk away from without feeling something and striking up a conversation about it. The credits close on a touching behind-the-scenes shot of the real-life Bernie with Jack Black researching the role. The filmmaking process here achieves the same thing the gossiping locals do—a way to judge people outside of a mere court of law. And in this case it seems like a fair trial to me.