by Larry Richman
May 9, 2008 9:23 PM

While I attend film festivals primarily for narrative features, works of fiction, I'm certainly not averse to seeking out quality documentaries. In fact, docs have often shown up on my lists of Top Picks from the various festivals I've attended. The U.S. vs. John Lennon, Billy the Kid, and Nanking all wowed me in the past couple of years and were among my 5 Top Picks from Toronto 2006, SXSW 2007, and Tribeca 2007, respectively. At this year's SXSW Film Festival, Body of War, FrontRunners, andThe Wrecking Crew all impressed me so much that I had to split my Top Picks into three narratives and three docs.

Among the 50 films I saw at the just-completed Tribeca Film Festival were nine documentaries. There was also at least one "pseudo-doc," that is, a film which would appear to be a doc but is actually a fictional, scripted narrative. Of course, being listed in the festival's program guide under "narrative features" and not "documentaries" should be a tipoff to the viewer but folks are still fooled. For that reason, I won't reveal them here.

Of the nine documentaries I saw, two were World Premieres:

A President to Remember: In the Company of John F. Kennedy (USA)
Squeezebox (USA)

The others were all International Premieres (first time seen outside their country of origin), North American Premieres, or New York Premieres. Those films were:

Warchild (USA)
Baghdad High (UK, Iraq)
Man on Wire (UK)
A Portrait of Diego: The Revolutionary Gaze (Mexico)
Old Man Bebo (Spain)
Head Wind (Iran)
Lou Reed's Berlin (USA)

Warchild went on to win the festival's Cadillac Audience Award. Director Carlos Carcas of Old Man Bebo won the jury award for Best New Documentary Filmmaker.

I'll be posting capsule reviews of these documentaries as I continue to post full-length reviews of my Top Picks from among the 38 narrative features I saw during the festival.