While I was in graduate school, many years ago, I wrote a master’s thesis on William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and have always loved the novel’s rich layering of the multiple, fragmentary points-of-view. Faulkner used to this technique — which he once described as “thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird” — to depict the Bundren family’s mock epic journey from their little hamlet to the county seat of Jefferson, where they have promised to bury the family’s matriarch, Addie. Because of my knowledge of the novel, I approached James Franco’s adaptation with a great deal of trepidation. Add …

Hirakazu Kore-eda’s Like Father, Like Son engages with questions of family and identity, exploring what it means to be a father, using a plot device in which children from two different families are switched at birth, a detail that is only discovered when the sons are about to enroll in school. The film’s primary point of identification is Ryota, a young father and ambitious businessman who strives to provide for his family and also to ensure that his son will have every opportunity for success. This desire for success is conveyed from the very opening shot, in which Ryota’s son, …

Given that James Franco’s adaptation of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying will be playing at this year’s Cannes, it seems appropriate to recall one of the novelist’s most famous quotations when thinking about two of the festival’s more memorable films. Reflecting on the conflicts over race and national identity that tore apart the deep south where he lived, Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun, “the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past.” This persistence of the past — how it can haunt us in myriad ways — is central to two of the more powerful films at this …

Negotiating Cannes is a unique challenge, especially for someone attending the festival for the first time. Although the festival is commonly associated with red carpets and other assorted glamour, my clearest memories of the festival entail trekking from a borrowed condo in Antibes early in the morning — thanks to the monumental patience of my wife who drove me in — to queue up with other journalists for an 8:30 press screening (finding those lines the first couple of days is an entirely different matter). Rainy weather early in the festival also seemed to undermine Cannes’ reputation for sun and …

Several of the films from this year’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival dealt with themes of community. Two films in particular that focused on question of community were Patrick Creadon’s If You Build It and Jeff Reichert and Farihah Zaman’s Remote Area Medical. In both cases, we are introduced to both the pleasures and the complexities of providing resources — medical or educational — to rural communities that have been neglected in recent years. If You Build It depicts the efforts of Emily Pilloton and Matt Miller to introduce a design-oriented curriculum to rural Bertie County, North Carolina, and to …

A number of films at this year’s Full Frame raised questions for me about issues related to memory, identity, and storytelling. As Amir Bar-Lev reminds us, in Full Frame’s programming notes, that documentary is a “strange and problematic medium where journalism and art meet,” and many of this year’s films reflect overtly or more subtly about the role of storytelling and its relationship to memory, identity, and in some cases, politics. Patrick Reed’s Fight Like Soldiers, Die Like Children, which had its North American premiere at Full Frame, depicts the efforts of Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire, a witness to the Rwanda …

The opening day of this year’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival has once again provided attendees with an eclectic offering of choices, including a number of timely films that touch on important political issues and a curated series organized by Amir Bar-Lev, Stories About Stories, that focuses on documentaries who engage with the question of narrative itself, as well as a tribute to the innovative documentary storyteller, Jessica Yu. But this variety of choices speaks to the vibrant work being done by documentary filmmakers and the programmers who organized this year’s festival, not to mention the vital questions that documentary …