Park City Dispatch. 4.

Year after year, once I've had my run of dramatic competition films at Sundance, I find myself returning to the documentaries. I find that I'm more likely to discover something here, less likely to watch a formula roll out over the screen.

In the past week, one film that's barely made itself known in the mix is Songbirds, Brian Hill's documentary that's been described as a prison musical, an accurate enough characterization that still falls short. Think of everything from Jailhouse Rock videos to the documentary Shakespeare Behind Bars to The Farm. If you haven't been inside, films will flood you with images about prison, a bit like the way gangster movies shape your notion of crime much more than crime does - that is, if crime hasn't happened to you.

This doc of testimony in song from women who are inside Downview prison in Britain first seemed to be a quirky way of approaching the pain of being locked up in country that, according to the Sundance catalog, locks up more of its  citizens than any other nation in Western Europe - they're still way behind the US (and that's not even counting the CIA prisons in Europe).

Songbirds is built around songs performed by prisoners. Each song tells the stories of the crime and the broader autobiography that got the singer convicted and imprisoned. Each musical style - like the punishment, as they say - fits the crime, and the crimes do vary. Each is choreographed like a music video. It would be hard enough to make this kind of documentary gambit plausible at all, much less compelling. Yet instead of parody or wish-fulfillment or the "look inside," here you get emotional truth that you wouldn't expect.

There are half a dozen songs here, all original - that's the key word. Hill starts with Mary, "Scary Mary," a punch-scarred career thief whose melodic rap-inspired declamation mocks the remorse required of the convicted criminal with the chorus "I'm Very Sorry"... for slicing your head open and throwing piss at you through the bars.

With other songs about carrying drugs (the upbeat ensemble ska number, "Mule It") or Irish ballads, the refrains are sung over and over again, reminding you of the kinds of events and relationships that end up putting women in jail - abusive parents, rape in childhood, stupid mistakes in adolescence that set your life irrevocably downhill, drugs and laws broken for love. Most of the women here at one time or another did something for a man that got them arrested. Some are in for 18 years, for bringing drugs into Britain. Seeing the film, and listening to the songs - all in the voices of the women prisoners - it's hard to believe that prison accomplishes much for these prisoners, besides giving some of them an opportunity to tell their stories.

None was a professional singer before the project was filmed, with lyrics by Simon Armitage and music by Simon Boswell, but the performances, bookend-ed with interviews that tell heartbreaking stories, are the real thing, real as music, real as testimony. A documentary needs to get an audience to sit down and look, which so often means sitting down and looking at something you thought you knew before.

Songbirds achieves that intensification of experience as it moves from character to character singing stories that you've skimmed condescendingly every day in the newspaper, if you've noticed them at all. The stories ring with emotion, so you're focused on what it took to put these women in prison, not on the extensive interviews, trust and musical imagination to turn that testimony into a film.

Don't assume that this is Every-prison. The women don't seem to be treated abusively - who really knows? - and it must have taken major cooperation from the warden and staff to allow the rehearsals and shooting. This approach probably won't work in too many other situations, even if there is a story in every prisoner. But it worked here.

Based on my sampling of people at the festival, only one or two others saw Songbirds. Yet I'm told there's talk of an American remake. Is it a recipe for failure? Keep your fingers crossed.

Another unlikely doc, for its logistics and its story, is TV Junkie. The title alone got me there. It made me think of the ultimate pulp update, when it's really a motivational story, the perennial extreme tale that, in its way, becomes a universal reality check.

Am I wrong, but wasn't it on Fox News that I heard a news analyst (or many of them) say that the most effective way to deal with junkies would be to sentence them to hard labor for endless terms and throw away the key, with no college courses, no television, no basketball? Or did I just hear an "expert" there list drug addicts with all those other delinquents who should get the death penalty? What happens if it's a drug addict whom you know? What if it's someone who works for Fox? Would you be more fair and balanced?

TV Junkie comes out of one man's obsession with videotaping his life that really makes you rethink all those "world-of-images" clichés. Rick Kirkham is the bright-eyed video nut from Oklahoma who tapes everything in his life - from family, to parties, to sex, to all his adventures. He finds the perfect job, TV reporter, and rises to the position of a correspondent for Inside Edition, where he makes a specialty of doing his own stunts like motorcycle jumping and setting himself on fire. He also has a "substance abuse" problem, which seems normal enough for a single guy who makes money and goes to a lot of parties.

He marries a girl from a small town in Texas after he gets her pregnant, sets her and his young son up in a Dallas suburb, and goes back to New York where he works for Fox and smokes crack.

Everything is taped - everything. We see the crack and booze taking Kirkham away from his job and eventually getting him fired. He and his wife fight, they have another child, they reconcile, he smokes more crack, things get worse until she leaves him for good (after a few years with the patience of Job for Kirkham's boyish taping and his addiction) and he finally gets sober. The film ends with a motivational speech to a high school of addicted teens. Sound familiar? Now you've seen it.

TV Junkie is less than two hours, down from 3000 hours of tape, distilled by Michael Cain, Matt Radecki and their team of "screeners" of Kirkham's video autobiography. The toll on Kirkham's family is painful as his kids watch their parents fight, yet Kirkham has a buoyant charm that comes back after the binges. There is real love here, in spite of everything.

We see it all, or do we? After the film's first screening, when the filmmakers reluctantly acknowledged that Kirkham was in the house, he made a motivational appeal to his audience to seek help for addiction. Fair enough. That's his life and his living now.

Kirkham told me after the screening that he also filmed himself scoring drugs on the street in NYC and elsewhere. Now that would be revealing, because it's not just the auto-Oprah generic family coming apart, the novelty of the dog that can stand on its legs and operate a video camera. We don't see it in TV Junkie, which Kirkham said was six hours long before it was cut to this length, 107 minutes.

What happened? Sometimes feature length doesn't serve a story like this. Capturing the Friedmans would probably also have been better served as a story in a much longer format. I guess that's what DVDs are for.

One of the strengths of Sundance is that there is likely to be another documentary to counterbalance the self-obsessive meltdown of TV Junkie. (Be that as it may, you should see this film. I'm sure that the filmmakers would disagree with that characterization of their story as narcissistic, and insist that they had to persuade Kirkham to allow them to put all his pain on the screen.)

For that counterbalancing fix, see God Grew Tired of Us, the chronicle of a small group from the 27,000 "lost boy" refugees from Sudan who are now settled in the US, in places like Pittsburgh and Syracuse. These boys, now men, are children who watched their parents get killed in their villages, sometimes hacked to death. They then walked 1000 miles to refugee camps in Kenya, where they spent ten years crowded together. Many died of disease there. Just listing their hardships trivializes them. The world's indifference trivializes them even more. The boys then were sent to various American cities, which first seemed like paradise because there were jobs, food and shelter. Soon they become lonely, and worry about losing their families and their culture. Their fears are well-founded.

The Sudanese young men have been through hell, and they are the lucky ones. Who knows how many of their relatives have been killed, how many women raped, how many driven off their land? The numbers are in the millions. Slender and elegant, beatific in their optimism, these are the survivors who were depicted as near-corpses in news coverage. Most of them still radiate with hope, although we see a group that has bought into the US consumer image of designer rap, with flashy cars and jewelry.

Christopher Quinn's film is funny as boys who never knew electricity move into apartments with televisions and telephones, eating airplane food on the way. The food was better in the refugee camp, one says.

You get uneasy watching these friendly adaptable young men; merchants fear them when they enter a store as a group, seeing only their skin, if not another species. Every phone call from abroad brings news of more deaths. Most of their money, and it's not much, goes back to family in Africa.

God Grew Tired of Us is not grand cinema. It makes no such claim. It gives us more time with its subject than we probably will get from any media coverage of the Sudan, unless the genocide there that is barely covered turns into an even grander extermination campaign. Funny that this was not the country we invaded, "liberated." Even if these documentaries take more than a year to make, they're filling gaps in journalism. More about that in a later installment.

Posted by dwhudson at January 25, 2006 7:50 AM