Invasion of the docs

Gradually, stealthily, like the pod people taking over the tiny town of Santa Mira in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” documentary filmmakers are taking over the not-so-tiny town of Park City, Utah, and the Sundance Film Festival, whose 2004 edition opens Thursday night with, what else, a documentary.

That would be “Riding Giants,” a look at surfing directed by Stacy Peralta of “Dogtown and Z-Boys.” That’s not only the first doc ever to open the festival (and the first time opening night has abandoned staid Salt Lake City), it’s also the first of a record 40-odd documentaries that, like those insidious pod people, have insinuated themselves into every Sundance nook and cranny.

Aside from the 16 docs in the official competition, there are nine in the World Documentaries section, which for the first time will have an audience award to call its own. There are documentaries in Native Forum, the avant-garde Frontier section, the wild and crazy Park City at Midnight. Ten of the 12 films in Special Screenings are docs, as are four American Spectrum films.

That section also has a pair of intriguing mock-documentaries. “September Tapes” is “The Blair Witch Project” in Afghanistan, a fictional story, complete with “found” tapes, shot in that troubled country. “CSA: The Confederate States of America,” is an ingenious, head-turning look at alternative history, presenting a modern television documentary, complete with commercials, as it would be if the South had won the Civil War.

Even the rival Slamdance Film Festival, celebrating its 10th anniversary and unapologetically gleeful at having outlasted the chief of police who predicted the event’s days were numbered, has a hefty doc contingent and, also for the first time, a separate documentary jury. For all anyone knows, there just might be a documentary hiding under your bed.

Of course, the documentary takeover is not complete. Sundance has hardly abandoned its dramatic competition, traditionally the focus of all eyes even though the number of films submitted this year was down from 750 to 688 while the docs, ever intrepid, had a modest uptick from 513 to 541.

Always concerned about keeping this part of the festival pure and untainted, Sundance has come up with a dramatic selection where 13 of the 16 directors are first-timers and none of the films has theatrical distribution. A noticeably charming entrant is writer-director Jane Weinstock’s “Easy,” a reality-based L.A. comedy starring an enchanting Marguerite Moreau as a “pathetic jerk magnet” who is trying to get serious about her romantic life.

Sundance’s biggest names, as always, are in the Premieres section. This year the most anticipated include Walter Salles’ “The Motorcycle Diaries,” starring Mexico’s Gael Garcia Bernal as Che Guevara, Hilary Swank in HBO’s suffragette drama “Iron Jawed Angels,” and a work-in-progress screening of “The Clearing,” a drama starring Helen Mirren, and, for the first time on a Sundance screen, Robert Redford.

The Foreign Language section, always one of the festival’s least appreciated treasures, was especially strong this year, with submissions more than doubling to 798 from last year’s 372. Among the best are two that are also their home country’s Academy Award nominees. From Germany, Wolfgang Becker’s “Goodbye, Lenin!” is a clear-eyed, bittersweet yet unmistakably heartfelt comedic look at the collapse of East Germany as a son has to pretend to his awakened-from-a-coma mother that the Berlin Wall never fell and communism is still a going concern. From Russia, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “The Return,” a beautifully made classic Russian art film with a surprisingly deep emotional kick, is about the effect on his two young sons of a father’s return after an unexplained absence of many years.

Sundance itself has gotten more worldly over the years, becoming such a chic destination that an upscale reader of Travel & Leisure recently pleaded with the magazine for advice on how to “snag restaurant reservations.” And the mania for Sundance knockoff events has even invaded the food area, as a venerable Main Street restaurant called Charlie O’s is bringing in a different master cook every night for an event called, yes, Chefdance.

Anyone desperate for a dose of reality as well as entertainment after all this can go back to those excellent documentaries. Two of the very best are personal docs, in which the filmmaker is front and center on the screen.

Ivy Meeropol’s compellingly titled “Heir to an Execution” is a potent reexamination of the Cold War furor surrounding the electrocution for spying of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a reexamination fraught with emotion because it’s done by their granddaughter. As a joining of filmmaker and subject, this combination of a relevant political story with heart-rending emotional material is exceptional.

“Born Into Brothels” follows photographer Zana Briski, who has lived for years in Calcutta’s red-light district. She not only befriended the children of prostitutes but gave them cameras and taught them how to use them. What makes this film special is more than the surprising quality of the pictures they take, it’s the remarkably buoyant personalities of these kids, wonderfully playful despite horrific living conditions.

Many of the best docs, both in and out of competition, deal with America’s racial divides. These include: “Citizen King,” which focuses in a detailed, deeply felt way on the last five years of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life and his determination to broaden his struggle beyond the civil rights arena; “The Fight,” a perceptive, informative, straight-ahead dual biography of black boxer Joe Louis and Germany’s Max Schmeling and the two fights these unwilling symbols of their respective societies had in the late 1930s as their countries edged toward total war; “Farmingdale,” a vivid picture that explores one of today’s most complex and intractable problems, the conflict that erupted when a Long Island, N.Y., community felt threatened by an influx of Mexican day laborers; “A Place of One’s Own,” veteran filmmaker Stanley Nelson’s personal examination, motivated by the death of his mother, of the Martha’s Vineyard community of Oak Bluffs, for decades the vacation spot of choice for upper-middle-class blacks.

Also about racial and cultural divides is the fascinating and informative “The Control Room,” a look at Al Jazeera, the Arab world’s version of CNN.

Though routinely demonized by Washington, the network comes across as committed both to strong journalistic principles and a worldview that understandably puts the needs of its constituency ahead of the demands of American policy.

Not all the strong documentaries, however, are about the cares of the world. “Word Wars,” for instance, is kind of “Spellbound” with grown-ups, a clever and amusing look at the world of high-level, competitive Scrabble, where the board is so full of obscure words, one observer says, “I thought they were playing in Albanian.”

Equally puckish is “Dirty Work,” a look at people who are amazingly cheerful and well-adjusted despite having occupations -- collecting bull semen, cleaning septic tanks, retouching corpses -- that most sane people would not attempt. Seeing too many films at Sundance is not included in the group -- it’s likely being saved for the sequel.