Big River Man is a brilliant documentary and deserving of all the awards it's received at film festivals. The film chronicles the journey of crazed Martin Strel, a Slovenian endurance swimmer who prides himself on drinking two bottles of wine a day. After successfully swimming the Mississippi, Danube, and Yangtze rivers, Strel decides his next venture is to swim the entire Amazon river.

The film begins highlighting Strel's prowess as a jovial overweight man who has successfully conquered rivers. When the time begins for him to venture on the river, Strel suits up in a wet suit and begins to navigate a river filled with garbage and toxins, logs big enough to kill him, crocodiles, and potentially hostile natives. None of this phases Strel as he pushes through, day by day, determined to achieve his goal and world record. As the days pass, Strel grows more and more weary, hobbling at the end of the day. The sun has given him second degree burns on his face, posing such a danger that Strel swims with a hat and ghostlike white cover on his face, an odd figure in the water.

Eventually Strel enters the fourth dimension, oblivious to any reality. The film captures his journey into insanity on the river, an Amazonian Kurtz who forgets any notion of reality, driven by his own blindness to conquer the wild. The filmmakers capture this insanity as they wind along the river to the finish line.

Manny has a crappy life. He works in a strip club, cleaning up after other people's shit. Diego, in between continuous tokes of a joint, fancies himself as a nature cinematographer, showing off his footage of ants on the march to fornication. Michael Ray Escamilla (Manuel) and Mando Alvarado (Diego) are not only the stars, but also the directors and writers of Cruzando, part road-trip buddy movie and part journey of self discovery. Manny is about to become a father, but before he can begin that journey, he needs to close the narrative of his own journey with his father.

Left when he was a young child, Manny's father crossed the border from Mexico into Texas, searching for a better life on the other side of the border. That's the last Manny knows of his father until he receives a letter from his father with a newspaper clipping detailing his father's soon to be execution in Huntsville, Texas. Before Manny can fathom becoming a father, he decides he needs to make it to Huntsville before his father is executed. And so begins his journey across the border.

With Diego by his side, filming everything for perhaps an award winning documentary, the two attempt to navigate a crossing of the border with The Matador, a former wrestling star who they mistake for a coyote. General ineptitude characterizes their crossing, but with a bit of luck and the kindness of strangers, Manny finds his way to Huntsville and eventually finds his way back home to embrace his own new life as a father.

The film is beautifully paced, capturing the rhythms of life on both sides of the border. Let's hope the filmmakers find a distributor so the film plays beyond the film festival circuit.

Emily and Sarah Kunstler's new documentary, William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe , answers Prufrock's question "Do I dare"; their father does indeed dare to disturb the universe, over and over, in his continuous battle against injustice. The film is part personal history and part historical accounting of their father's fights against injustice, fights that sometimes left his family and the public wondering what justice Kunstler was serving. As the daughters retell some of his history, they are not only providing their viewers with a lens of his past, but they are also trying to make meaning out of their father's career.

Starting with his early cases, those that defined him as the civil rights lawyer to have on your side, the film footage began with a brief history of the Berrigan and the Chicago 7 cases. These were defining moments that made Kunstler a civil rights household name. Retelling Attica, the film shows the agony of defeat, the senseless deaths and an injustice that was never righted. The daughters visit the site of Attica, filming the words on a monument to the fallen guards. They note that there has never been a monument/written notice to the fallen prisoners, so they do the justice their father ingrained in them: the names of the fallen prisoners are listed on the screen. Another of the film's poignant moments is the look at the Central Park Jogger case. Viewing the early parts of the case, we see Kunstler coming to the defense of Yusef Salaam, an act questioned by many since Salaam supposedly was a savage member of a "pack of wolves" that raped a jogger in Central Park. The film later discloses how the five originally charged with the case were found innocent, a testament to Kunstler's belief in justice.

Kunstler, though, isn't always redeemed for the public and for his daughters. At times, he is portrayed as a lawyer who has lost his vision for "correct" justice, evident in the history of his questionable cases: a mock cat trial where he represented Tyrone the Cat for acts against humanity, representation of John Gotti, defense of El Sayed Noseir (assassin of Rabbi Meir Kahane). 

The Kunstler girls did not have an ordinary upbringing. While many young children grow up scared of ghosts and monsters, they grew up scared of the FBI and police. One of the daughers recounts a memory of picking up the phone, hearing a dial tone, expecting to hear evidence of the phone being tapped. When their father was defneding Noseir, protestors angrily shouted outside their Manhattan brownstone, causing the girls, on their return from school, to sometimes continue walking, not wanting people to know that they lived in the house of the man defending the killer of a Jewish leader. 

At the memorial service for their father, Kunstler's photo looms large, a figure that not only left his mark on the public, but also on his daughters. Just like their father, they too dare to disturb the universe by not only reminding the public of their father's fights, but also through their production company Off Center Media that produces documentaries focused on injustices in the criminal system.

Part poetry, part pot heaven, Tim Blake Nelson's latest film, Leaves of Grass is sheer delight. The film stars Edward Norton, playing twin brothers Bill and Brady. Bill escapes his family roots of Little Dixie, Oklahoma, finding home in the Ivy League world of classical philosophy (he is a prof at Brown University being courted for a position at Harvard Law School), studying and lecturing about the notion that you really don't control the course of your life. His brother Brady reads his brothers published articles, even if he uses the dictionary (not just any dictionary, Brady prefers the O.E.D.), during the time he is not tending to his hydroponic pot business. The film revolves around the two brothers. Brady lures Bill back home (under false pretenses) so that Bill can stand in for him (be an alibi) while Brady goes off to settle things with a local drug dealer. Ultimately, Bill is forced to rediscover himself, no longer able to hide behind his academic distance from his roots. Great performances by Norton, supported by Susan Sarandon, Tim Blake Nelson, and Richard Dreyfuss. At times the film echoes a bit of the Coen Brothers (they are thanked in the credits) with a dynamic cast of characters (an edgy transplanted New York Jewish orthodonist). This film releases at the end of December--definitely go see it.

I love documentaries--the way they mediate reality, the stories that take form as scenes unfold, and the experience to learn something new about a subject I knew little about. Such was the case the other night at the Denver International Film Festival at the screening of Forgetting Dad, a new film by Rick Minnich and Matt Sweetwood. The film chronicles Minnich's father's (Richard) experience with amnesia, a condition he supposedly suffered as a result of a minor car accident. When his dad developed amnesia, shortly following the car accident, he emerged as "a new Richard," someone who had no idea about his past, nor showed any desire to reconnect with that past. The film sometimes reads like a mystery, following Rick has he searches for the truth about what happened, trying to discover whether the amnesia is truly a hoax, something his father has created to release himself from any obligations (such as his family) he no longer desired. It's a heartbreaking film at times, watching family members cope with the rollercoaster emotion ride their dad has taken them on, a ride he doesn't share with them. There is no clear conclusion to whether the amnesia is real or fabricated. The only truth that the filmmaker can conclude is that he may never know the truth of his father's condition. The film poignantly closes with a dedication to the old Richard and the new Richard.