I spent last weekend watching documentaries. This may not sound at first hearing like the most exciting weekend a person could have, but every year at this time I spend all of my money and time to go see more documentary films than a person should see in four days at True/False, a documentary film festival in its tenth year that is a highlight of the year for me and my little town. Directors and producers and writers and fans descend on the city and turn it into temporary mecca for (mostly) nonfiction narrative cinema (and for hoodies, which for some reason go with documentaries like Botox goes with Hollywood), and normal residents like me get to forget our day jobs and immerse ourselves in a vibrant and inventive art form.
Emerging bleary-eyed and wrung out (maybe that explains the hoodies) on the other end of my sixteen-film weekend, I’ve been thinking about documentaries, especially in light of what I do, which is study and teach fiction. This isn’t so paradoxical—nonfictional and fictional narrative share more than most people think, and have a lot to teach us about each other. Continue reading “The Lost Weekend”