Review: Documentary Edge Festival

A scene from Spike Lee's film, If God Is Willing. Photo / Supplied

Spike Lee They're big names, Spike Lee and Oliver Stone. Big personalities not afraid to tackle big subjects with appropriate bombast.

When they make an entrance, at the Oscars or the grocery store, I bet a fanfare announces them: Public Enemy for Lee; The Doors for Stone. They have presence, Stone and Spike; they have clout.

What's interesting is that both drama heavyweights have turned their intense gaze and influence towards non-fiction, and we can see their efforts this weekend at the close of the Documentary Edge festival.

In South of the Border, Stone visits South American presidents while Lee, no doco-come-lately, has followed up When the Levees Broke, his 2006 masterpiece on the New Orleans floods, with If God is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise.

It's an appropriately long title for a four-hour movie.

"Drama directors do docos" is one side of a trend moving fictional films and documentaries closer together. Coming to meet Lee and Stone halfway are straight-up documentary-makers, increasingly telling their stories via animation, recreations and (in the case of the festival film about nuclear waste, Into Eternity) horror music.

You no longer have to do drama to be dramatic - or cheesy.

To my mind, docudrama is difficult to pull off in cinema without reminding your audience of 60 Minutes re-enactments. If we wanted something "based on a true story" we could go to the latest Hollywood biopic (Lee's Malcolm X is a stellar example) or watch the past 60 years of American history in Stone's entire fictional oeuvre. The best festival films I've seen so far this year - An African Election and Thieves by Law - are good because of their incredible access to charismatic Ghana politicians and Russian mafia respectively. No re-enactments necessary.

I watched a docudrama by accident at the festival - Eichmann's End - Love, Treachery, Death. And while I enjoyed it, it wasn't made clear how the film's climax (in which a 16-year-old Jewish girl in Argentina asks her ex-boyfriend's scary father if he is Eichmann) led to Eichmann's arrest. Sequence and history sacrificed for histrionics.

On the other hand, animations rock. In another festival film, Eternal Sunshine - the Story of Fishbone (narrated by the unrelated Laurence Fishburne, an amusing touch), the original California punk band is shown meeting at junior high school in cartoon, Fat Albert style. It was a fun way of illuminating the personalities described in interviews, and, unlike re-enactment (or relying solely on surviving photos), the cartoon medium did not suggest the band had superhuman accurate memories or that those memories coincided exactly with the director's depiction.

It's true that cartoon Nazis are not always appropriate. But film-makers can mix it up: a much darker incident in Fishbone's history was painted in a sad, impressionistic style.

In a counter trend, film-makers are increasingly filming themselves. While this may work for personal films, when your subject is nuclear waste (Into Eternity) or genocide (Granito), a romantic-activist director onscreen looks terribly self-indulgent. Yet Spike Lee, of all people, shows humility.

Festival co-director Dan Shanan thinks Lee's Hurricane Katrina series is one of the most ground-breaking works of the last decade because of its lyricism and captivating interviewees. And Lee "isn't putting himself in the centre of the film, he lets people tell their stories", Shanan says. Aw yeah, get the man a "most humble award" badge.