Graham Reid: Film Festival favourites

Abouna - Films out of Africa are rare enough, but this one from Chad, with music by Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure, looks a probing and timely gem as two boys whose father disappears are sent to a Koranic school by their mother for discipline and moral guidance.

Bus 174 - One of those snippets that flash on our nightly news, in this case a bus hijack in Brazil three years ago, is given expanded treatment into what sounds like a South American Dog Day Afternoon as the hijacker holds a television audience enthralled and the police at stand-off while milking popular sentiment and the media attention.

Spellbound - White-knuckle tension, beads of sweat, an anxious audience reduced to an enthralled silence, and only one winner? Yes, it's a spelling bee and anyone who has witnessed this American obsession will be holding their breath and diving for the dictionary as this human drama of kids under pressure unfolds.

Stevie - From the director of the basketball doco Hoop Dreams comes this true story of a childhood friend he mentored in rural Illinois whose life has gone into a nose-dive. Whether director Steve James can help or should simply observe as his craft demands is only one of the dilemmas in a doco full of characters whose dreams have been denied.

My Architect - The great American architect Louis Kahn created some of the most powerful modernist works of last century but, in an age now where private lives are public information and to be marketed in the service of a career, his greatest achievement may have been he kept three separate families. This doco by a son from the third relationship explores the man, the myth and the mystery of a private life hidden by one of the most public of men.