The Reeler has a good piece up on Marshall Curry, whose Street Fight opened today at New York’s IFC Center.

From the piece:

“While viewing Curry’s riveting film last week, it occurred to me that this could absolutely be the dark horse nominee come March 5. In chronicling Newark’s 2002 mayoral race between relative newcomer Cory Booker and Jersey’s reigning machine-politics king Sharpe James, Curry captures a system imploded by racism, corruption, lies and at least a few physical altercations. Perhaps more shockingly, Street Fight reflects the assured work of a first-time feature filmmaker–a guy who quit his job, bought a camera and followed the campaign with his crew of one just to see what would happen. A complete and total hunch.”

I’m a big fan of the film and recommend it highly. I first turned on to it last spring when I went to Hot Docs, the giant documentary conference in Toronto. Trying to figure out which of the 300+ films to check out, I resorted to a time-tested method: asking the volunteer driver chaffeuring me from the airport what he had heard was good. “Street Fight,” he told me, and I made a point of checking out the film and then placed Curry in our Filmmaker 25 New Faces of Independent Film 2005. Less than a year later, Curry, a first-time director who bought a camera on credit to begin his film, is, as the Reeler calls him, the dark horse nominee at the Oscars in the Best Documentary category.