Point and shoot

Documentaries tell it like it is. Their concern is with the truth. And, remarkably, we're queuing up to see them. Let Matthew Sweet introduce you to the cream of the New Documentarist crop

Here they are, the three greatest drop-your-popcorn scenes in the past year of cinema: a skittish boy gurning through his braces as he attempts to sound out the constituent letters of the word "banns"; the pupils of a one-room school in rural France, conjugating their verbs; the survivor of the descent of the vicious side of a Peruvian mountain, describing his decision to cut the safety rope and send his partner crashing to the bottom of a crevasse. And they have a number of things in common: nobody pitched them at a meeting; nobody loved the script; nobody's people called anybody else's people; nobody took it again, from the top. All were little fragments of the real world which - thanks to the efforts of a confident new generation of documentary film-makers - found their way into the multiplex alongside Brad and Julia and all those smackable little hobbits.

Ask these film-makers how this happened, and most will give you a two-word answer. "Michael Moore," says the Brazilian director Jose Padilha. "He can take most of the credit." In May 2002, the jury at the Cannes Film Festival created a special award to honour Bowling for Columbine, Moore's pop at the American gun laws, and film distributors sat up and noticed. By the time the mountainous American satirist was standing on the podium of the 2002 Academy Awards ceremony, gripping his Oscar and spitting at George W Bush, Bowling for Columbine had grossed $21m (£11.8m) at the US box office and had become the most profitable non-fiction feature film ever. Successful documentaries had been made in the past - Nick Broomfield's exposés of figures such as Heidi Fleiss and Courtney Love, for instance - but nothing like this. With Bowling for Columbine, the form found a mass international audience. And the circus that surrounded last week's Cannes premiere of its sequel, Fahrenheit 911, showed that Moore is as enormous as ever.

Moore's success had three immediate beneficiaries. Kevin Macdonald's Touching the Void used dramatic reconstruction and interview footage to elucidate the story of two British mountaineers who cheated death - and, some argue, each other - on the face of a snow-whipped Andean peak. Nicholas Philibert's Être et Avoir found quiet drama in the daily work of a soft-spoken teacher in a French village - and more acrimonious drama in the legal claims and counter-claims of some of its subjects, who are now suing for a slice of its profits. Jeffrey Blitz followed a phalanx of participants in the American National Spelling Bee competition, and produced Spellbound, a film that was both a pin-sharp portrait of American aspiration, and a thriller as gripping as the Hitchcock picture with which it shares a title.

And the success of these films, in turn, has allowed a second crop of stranger-than-fiction stories to thrive. In the past two months, Andrew Jarecki's Capturing the Friedmans has described what befell a middle-class Jewish family in suburban New York when the head of the household was accused of colluding with his youngest son to molest and brutalise 13 young boys; Jose Padilha's Bus 174 used the story of a hijack in Rio de Janeiro to examine the lives of the city's dispossessed children. Next month, Helen Stickler's Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator will investigate the brief career of the skateboarding legend Mark "Gator" Rogowski, who crashed from the top of his half-pipe to a cell in a Californian jail.

Michael Moore may be responsible for opening up the market for these pictures, but the inheritors of his success have little sympathy with his methods - or with those of any director who positions himself at the centre of a film. Andrew Jarecki confesses: "90 per cent of the time when I see that I find it intrusive and unnecessary, because unless you genuinely are the central character, it can be a relatively lazy way of making a film: you can end up being a walking apologist for what's missing."

They're a diffident bunch, these new documentarists. They don't appear on camera. They abhor the use of a narrator. They decline to offer the audience an aggressive editorial line. The hit-and-run approach of the previous generation fills them with mistrust. Only Lee Hirsch - the director of Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony - admits to having told a lie to secure an interview. (As it was to some former South African riot police, it's difficult to get too indignant.) "One of the most shameful things I've ever seen on screen," says Helen Stickler, "was the scene in Nick Broomfield's film Kurt and Courtney, in which he's got the former nanny in a darkened room and she's crying, and he's interrogating her. That's a person I'd never want to be. I wouldn't feel comfortable putting someone in a position of real psychic pain and then recording that on camera and playing it over and over again for the rest of eternity. That would be bad for me, karmically."

A common approach, however, has not yet clarified into an identifiable school or movement. "There is a kind of kinship between documentary filmmakers," observes Jeffrey Blitz, "but it's not really based in stylistic choices or choices of narrative strategy. It's based on more practical, pragmatic concerns. So many of us were drawn to documentary because it allowed us to make a movie so inexpensively that we could control the story, start to finish. The point is that we are kindred souls not because of how we want to craft our stories but because of how we want to control our own destinies." Not those, you'll note, of others.

Andrew Jarecki

Andrew Jarecki knew nothing of David Friedman's traumatic teenage years when he fastened upon him for a documentary he wanted to make about clown entertainers in Manhattan. It soon became clear, however, that his subject's balloon-sculpting at children's parties on the Upper East Side was significantly less interesting than the tale he began to tell about how his father, Arnold, and youngest brother, Jesse, were convicted of raping 13 boys who had come to the house for computer lessons; how throughout the crisis, nobody thought to put the camcorder away; and that consequently, the family had committed an intimate document of its collapse to VHS.

Capturing the Friedmans is Jarecki's first film - he graduated from Princeton in 1985, but put his film-making ambitions on hold for a decade while he made his fortune with Moviefone, a cinema-listings service which he sold to AOL in 1999. In the course of his research, he interviewed the police detectives who prosecuted the case, several of the alleged victims, and the main members of the Friedman family - except for Seth, the middle brother, who declined to co-operate, and has since expressed his anger that the film was made at all. "You have the power to judge whether this family were capable of the crimes which were alleged," contends Jarecki. "Whether they're a bunch of vicious criminals, or a relatively normal family that was in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Jarecki refuses to reveal his personal view on whether the Freidmans are guilty or innocent. Arnold's own admissions establish the reality of his sexual interest in young boys, though no convincing evidence is produced that he or his son assaulted the boys in the computer class. "There are problems on both sides of this case," admits Jarecki. "But you can't watch the film without realising that the chief detective, who was the engine of the case, is somebody who tells a number of lies on camera." The foot-high stacks of child pornography that she claims to have seen in the house, for instance, appear nowhere in the photographs that the police took as they searched the building.

The film's nomination for an Oscar mobilised those who felt undermined by the film: two of Arnold's and Jesse's alleged victims petitioned the Academy to rescind the vote; the judge in the case, Abbey Boklan, told the press that she regarded the film as "inaccurate, unfair and untrue".

Jarecki is sticking to his story: "I've been extremely careful, extremely consistent, so the only thing I don't like being criticised for is not being thorough." He points out that Jesse Friedman, who was jailed for 13 years, is currently engaged in legal proceedings to have his case re-examined - which might potentially cause great embarrassment to Judge Boklan. "I haven't taken a position on that, and I don't think it's my place to," says the director. "It's Jesse's right, and I think it's absolutely inappropriate for the judge to be out there lobbying. But I'm very glad that the film has stirred this debate. It's been out for a year in the States, and people are still talking."

'Capturing the Friedmans' is on release at selected cinemas nationwide

Jose Padilha

Jose Padilha was only a few blocks away from the action when the events described by his film, Bus 174, brought Rio de Janeiro to a halt. On 12 June 2000, a young man named Sandro do Nascimento pulled a gun on a busload of commuters, and found himself under observation by a horde of police and 35 million Brazilians, watching the live television coverage from their living rooms. Sandro was acutely aware that his actions were being relayed to the nation. "This ain't no action movie!" he exclaimed from the window - knowing, of course, that this was exactly what he had created.

Padilha, a veteran director of television documentaries, was dissatisfied by the version of the story conveyed by the news reports, and set about investigating the background of the man who became the perpetrator - and one of the two fatal victims - of the hijack. He discovered that Sandro had been part of the group of street children who had been attacked in the Candelaria Massacre - a notorious atrocity committed in 1993 by a gang of policemen committed to culling undesirables from the streets of Rio. "Sandro represents a certain class of people in Rio," argues Padilha, "and by talking about him and explaining who he was, I was able to talk about a broader group of people who have an impact upon the life of the city, namely the street kids."

Although he was present at the scene, Padilha resisted the temptation to include himself in the action of his film. "The documentary's not made up of my opinions. Everything that we found out was fact, and it's pretty hard to argue with fact. It's a fact that the police killed those people at Candelaria. It's a fact that street kids are badly treated in Brazil. That's why I didn't have a lot of criticism, even from people on the very far right wing."

Moreover, he disapproves of the technique in principle. "More and more we're seeing documentary film-makers who film themselves all the time. I don't like to do that at all. Although it sometimes makes for a great film, it takes something away from the art of documentary-making. By filming yourself you become an actor in your own film and you can set up the things you need to make your point almost like you were making a fiction film.

"I think that the spirit of documentary film-making is about trying to capture reality as it's unfolding in front of you."

'Bus 174' is on release at selected cinemas nationwide

Jeffrey Blitz

It's a mark of the generosity of Jeffrey Blitz's Spellbound that the director allows its most preposterous participant to voice the film's founding argument. Rajesh, the father of Neil, the most diffident contestant in the National Spelling Bee competition, is so keen for his son to succeed that he makes a statistical analysis of the previous results, drills him through several thousand words a day, and allows their family in India to pay a thousand people to pray for victory. "America is just great," he enthuses. "There is no way you can fail in this country - if you work hard you're made."

Blitz himself is the product of similar immigrant zeal. His mother grew up poor in Mosesville, a Jewish settlement in rural Argentina, worked hard to put herself through medical college, qualified as a paediatrician and secured a placement at a New York City hospital - where she met Blitz's father, a research psychologist. Blitz, consequently, was raised in relative comfort in Ridgewood, New Jersey, where - despite his stammer - he entered the inter-schools debating competition and was eventually named state champion.

Spellbound was his first project after graduating from the University of Southern California: he and his producer, Sean Welch, financed the film by signing up with 14 credit card companies and spending to the limit. ("No one," he warns, "should get into documentary film-making with an eye toward fattening their wallet.") After accruing a number of awards on the festival circuit, the film was nominated for an Oscar in 2003 - the year that Bowling for Columbine took the prize.

He too disapproves of the stuntwork that characterises the more confrontational forms of documentary. "Some of my peers say this is out of a sense of moral obligation," he notes. "I understand where they're coming from but it's less dutiful in my mind. I think that when you make a documentary, you want to create an atmosphere of trust and openness so that your subjects share of themselves in a way that makes for compelling moviemaking."

'Spellbound' (Metrodome) is out on DVD

Lee Hirsch

Hirsch's Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony documents the struggle against apartheid through music - the morale-boosters sung by guerrilla fighters, the protest anthems sung on the barricades, the dirges commemorating atrocities in the townships, the pop tunes rich with coded political messages. The product of nine years of research, his work forms the only significant filmed record of an oral tradition that, after a decade of democracy, is already being forgotten. "Songs," notes Hirsch, "die with people." So why did it take a film-maker from Long Island to preserve them for posterity?

The question has been asked in South Africa, too, where Amandla!... caused resentful rumblings among young intellectuals. "There was a lot of talk about 'this fucking American'," he admits. "America isn't very popular at the moment among young film-makers and activists and lefties, and rightly so. The question they asked was: 'Did I have a right to tell this story?' It was a healthy debate. It never became ugly. I was never dragged through the mud."

The success of the film in Johannesburg suggests that he got it right: perhaps it was a job for an outsider. Hirsch has been fascinated by the ambivalent relationship that some South Africans have with the songs that once expressed their feelings about living under tyranny. At a recent official ceremony, he noted the reluctance of veterans of the struggle to strike up one of the old tunes. "Some of these songs are a little embarrassing for a newly minted capitalist to be singing. They're not politically correct anymore." Thanks to Hirsch's efforts, these songs will outlive this period of diffidence.

'Amandla! A Revolution in Four-Part Harmony' (Metrodome) is out on DVD

Helen Stickler

Helen Stickler isn't the first person to tell the story of Mark "Gator" Rogowski - idol of skateboard parks whose career ended in drink, violence and a sentence of 31 years-to-life, which he is now serving. In 1991, Hard Copy, one of American TV's sleazier current affairs shows, reported on the case a fortnight after he confessed to raping and murdering Jessica Bergsten. "They chopped the story up and told it in such an exploitative way," recalls Stickler, "that it became a huge embarrassment for everybody in the industry."

It took many months for the Kentucky-born director to persuade the former skate champion's friends and colleagues to be interviewed for her first feature, Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator. "In the end, however," she confesses, "I think they all just felt sorry for me."

Californian prisons do not countenance filmed interviews with their inmates, so Mark Rogowski's account of himself is given down a fuzzy telephone line. He has yet to see the film. "Every once in a while someone will ask if Gator's getting any proceeds from the film," reflects Stickler. "Proceeds? It always gives me a good laugh. I probably won't even break even. Documentaries are heartbreaking in that way. I made commercials for MTV to finance the picture, and then lived on credit cards for two years. I've just started to crawl my way out of that..."

'Stoked: The Rise and Fall of Gator' is released on 25 June