Beyond the Multiplex

To switch gears drastically, there are a couple of powerful and demanding documentaries here I'd be remiss not to mention. Timeliest of these is Charles Ferguson's "No End in Sight," a systematic and rigorous history of the Iraq war to date. An MIT Ph.D. and onetime Silicon Valley pioneer (he wrote the Internet start-up memoir "High Stakes, No Prisoners"), Ferguson has no previous experience as a filmmaker. But this piercing and unbiased account of all the stupidity, venality and small-mindedness that created our nation's latest foreign policy disaster combines hardheaded journalism and a tragic sensibility.

This is no left-wing screed; Ferguson himself says he was initially optimistic about America's foray into Iraq. His interviewees include former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, retired Gen. Jay Garner (the first coalition governor of Iraq) and the principal author of the 2004 National Intelligence Estimate, which tried to warn the Bush administration about the bottomless, nightmarish money pit that lay ahead. That was the document described by George W. Bush as "guesswork," even though (its authors say) the president had not read it or even seen it.

Ferguson synthesizes existing footage and his own interviews and original research -- he spent several weeks in Iraq, working under armed guard -- to create a portrait of an ideologically driven administration that conducted a war with disastrous incompetence, in which every bad decision was followed by another one. In dissolving the Iraqi military, firing most of the Baathist bureaucracy and allowing public buildings to be looted to the bare walls, Ferguson suggests, the Americans set themselves on a course toward inevitable humiliation. This is the film those stubborn Bush supporters in your family need to see.

Possibly even tougher to watch (though it's a close race) is Steven Okazaki's "White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki," which will be shown on HBO in August and may also get a theatrical release. Of course we know about the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in August 1945 -- perhaps the defining event of the 20th century -- but this humbling, shocking film reminds us that we don't really know enough.

Okazaki interviews 14 survivors of the two bombings -- which killed about 210,000 people directly and led to the deaths of some 150,000 more from radiation-related illness -- along with four Americans involved in building and delivering the bombs. He also includes rarely seen footage of the two cities in the immediate aftermath of the devastation, shot first by Japanese news cameras and later by American occupation forces. No warning can really prepare you for these images of ashen corpses, maimed survivors and apocalyptic destruction, but in an age of renewed nuclear tension, there can be no question as to their relevance.

Okazaki, a Japanese-American whose father fought in the U.S. Army during World War II, ducks the question of whether the A-bomb attacks were moral or justifiable. As he put it in remarks after the screening I attended, that debate is now pointless, and often becomes a way of avoiding what actually happened, what it looked like and what those who lived through it can still tell us. (It's a disappearing generation; even the youngest of those who can remember the bombings clearly are now close to 70.)

As Okazaki demonstrates in the film's first scene, both of the nations involved in the catastrophe are in danger of forgetting it. While the A-bomb defined postwar Japan's identity in a certain sense, it also became a shameful subject surrounded by silence. (Survivors and their descendants face discrimination to this day.) When he stops eight random strangers on the street in Tokyo and asks them what historical event occurred on Aug. 6, 1945, none of them know.

During my last hours in Park City, I resisted sleep and crept into a late-night screening of "Once," a lovely musical romance from Irish writer-director John Carney that might be this festival's ultimate sleeper hit. A heartbroken Dublin street musician (played by Glen Hansard, of the Irish band the Frames), who busks for shoppers all day but sings his original folk-rock material at night, meets a classically trained Czech pianist (Markéta Irglová) who's now selling flowers.

They fit together wonderfully, both as musicians and as guy 'n' gal, but there remains a slightly mysterious distance between them. His songs -- neither character is named -- are all written to a missing girlfriend, and she has a 2-year-old daughter whose dad is still in the Czech Republic. They drift through Dublin, separately and together, in a mellow haze of music and infatuation. But Carney has measured the bitter and the sweet in precise proportions in "Once"; this is a romance for everyone who has ever fallen in love when you weren't really free to do so. A wistful and delightful little film, just the thing to send me on a jet plane homeward with an Irish song in my heart.

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