Movies

AUSTIN – The stars are here for South by Southwest: Edward Norton, who plays twin brothers in Leaves of Grass. Robert Duvall, Bill Murray and Quitman, Texas' own Sissy Spacek, the stars of Get Low. Robert Rodriguez, promoting the upcoming Predators, which he produced at his Austin-based Troublemaker Studios. (Rodriguez's friend, a guy named Quentin Tarantino, was slated to appear at a genre movies panel on Saturday but didn't show.

We'll hear from all of them in due time. But SXSW is still a down-to-earth kind of festival, so we're going to keep this column real by chronicling a remarkable day of documentary movie going. I hit four docs on Saturday, all disparate but revelatory. By the end of the day, my head was swimming with the glories and terrors of real life as captured by artists at the top of their game.

First up was War Don Don (translation: "The war is over"), an evenhanded but subtly critical look at a commander on trial for war crimes in Sierra Leone. Directed by Harvard Law School graduate Rebecca Richman Cohen, War Don Don is a legal-process film that incorporates small dramas of reconciliation, revenge and a justice system which, like most, has inherent flaws. Richman's film doesn't stand up and shout, "Rush to judgment!" Instead it quietly observes that all mass atrocities, in this case a long and bloody civil war, require symbols of retribution.

After War I caught my breath, had a long chat with the Dallas International Film Festival's John Wildman and headed back to the same theater in the Austin Convention Center to catch the beguiling Marwencol. This one's a keeper.

Mark Hogancamp, a bad drunk with a thing for women's shoes, was jumped by five guys outside a bar in Kingston, N.Y., and beaten into a coma. When he emerged, he set to work creating a 1/6 scale World War II-era Belgian village made up of dolls and meticulously crafted props. This is Hogancamp's new life, his very own alternate universe, and he tends to it and photographs it with loving care. Director Jeff Malmberg wisely gives Hogancamp's tableaux room to breathe; we get an inside look at a miniature world and the man who made and inhabits it. Like War Don Don, Marwencol is part of the SXSW's documentary competition.

I headed south, to the Alamo Drafthouse on Lamar Boulevard, for the best film I saw all day. Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein's How to Fold a Flag is a sequel of sorts to their 2004 doc Gunner Palace. Interweaving the post-Iraq stories of veterans from the 2/3 Field Artillery, Flag achieves the difficult task of making us care for its characters without simplifying them one iota. Among the soldiers is Corpus Christi's Michael Goss, who reels from the scars and memories of war and finds an outlet in cage fighting. When Goss walked to the front of the theater to answer questions after the screening, he received a lengthy standing ovation. Texas knows how to treat its own.

Finally, Dallas' Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Looming Tower, showed up at the Alamo for a surprise screening of My Trip to Al Qaeda. Directed by Alex Gibney, an Oscar winner for his Iraq doc Taxi to the Dark Side, My Trip is an expanded take on Wright's one-man multimedia show of the same name. A prismatic, angry and accessibly erudite history lesson and travelogue through recent Middle East and American traumas, the film goes a long way toward making sense of what is often incomprehensible. That's what great documentaries, and great film festivals, do best.