Kansas City Star, January 26, 2008
Sundance wrapup: Hearts and minds

PARK CITY, UTAH - I don't think it's any accident that the films embraced by audiences at this year's 2008 Sundance Film Festival weren't the usual quirky comedies and dysfunctional relationship dramas, but rather those formerly humble vessels known as documentaries.

At a time when people are feeling lied to - election season plus an unpopular war will do that - truth-telling has an undeniable appeal.

But it's more than that.

A new wave of directors, inspired by the ones who did so much to push the bar forward in the 1990s, have brought Hollywood production values, powerful real-life storytelling and crowd-pleasing features - like, oh, humor - to what was once a reliable and even predictable video form.

It was not that long ago that documentaries aimed at either the head or the heart. But the films that got Sundance filmgoers talking this month did both. Just as Michael Moore, Errol Morris and the makers of "Hoop Dreams" pushed their audiences to demand more of nonfiction film, the same will be said of documentaries like the ones I saw this week.

Here now, my five favorites from Sundance 2008's documentary competition. Many will be on TV this year, and on DVD, and some will undoubtedly make their way to the True/False Film Fest in Columbia, Mo., next month.

"The Linguists"

Two ethnographers run around the world making tapes of people speaking so-called "endangered languages." Sound like homework? It's not, for these two geniuses have an adventurous streak, and the two cameras follow them as they travel the globe, getting people to speak in obscure tongues (some with as few as one practicing speaker) to their microphones and cameras. Funny, enlightening and ultimately uplifting, "The Linguists" demonstrates how the act of recording a dying language can, ironically, bring it back to life.