Beyond the Multiplex

"War/Dance" This crowd-rouser, which won a Sundance directing prize for the husband-wife team of Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine, combines a veritable perfect storm of allergy-producing documentary elements. It's not just about kids; it's about kids from a war zone (in this case, northern Uganda), most of them with horrific personal histories to recount. It's not just about a talent competition; it's about a talent competition pitting war-zone-kids-with-terrible-stories against kids who are better off and grew up in more normal circumstances. It doesn't just feature music and dance numbers; it's got romping, stomping, blow-the-doors-off, celebration-of-life music and dance numbers. Furthermore, the Fines rely on a host of techniques that could be considered hackneyed or dubious or both: It depends on a tiny handful of individuals to tell a much larger story; it shows children declaiming their own experiences, in suspiciously articulate and reflective language, in extreme close-up or in murmured voice-over; it uses the stark beauty of the African grasslands, and the seemingly innocent games of children, as contrasts to the grim stories being told; it explains nothing about the political, social or cultural background of the Ugandan civil war.

While that last factor still bugs me, you can't say that "War/Dance" is irresistible despite all these clichés. In fact, it's the film's reassuring, almost hypnotic visual rhythms, along with its Hollywood-like narrative structure -- which is closer to "Drumline" or "Bring It On" than to most documentaries -- that make it bearable. At least two of the abandoned children the Fines profile in the Patongo refugee camp, members of a rural tribe victimized by rebel militiamen, have personal histories so hideous you couldn't stand to hear them without some sugarcoating. But we already know that these kids are part of the Patongo school's improbable success in Uganda's national song-and-dance competition for schoolchildren, so what they have endured becomes the back story to a narrative of triumph.

Does the Patongo kids' dynamite ensemble version of the Bwola, an ancestral dance of the Acholi people, somehow make it OK that a girl named Rose had to watch her parents beheaded, or that a boy named Dominic was abducted as a child soldier and forced to kill innocent strangers? Probably not, but I don't think the Fines are making an argument that specious. It's more like: Rose and Dominic's lives are not over, despite the unbelievably bad stuff that has happened to them. They're not just victims, but remain the agents of their own lives: Rose quietly believes she's the best dancer in the troupe, and I defy you to refrain from blubbering when Dominic brags that he wants the world to know he's the best xylophone player in northern Uganda. Now we know it, kid. (Opens Nov. 9 in New York, Los Angeles and other major cities, with wider national release to follow.)

"Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037" Luring non-piano-buff viewers to see this "process" documentary about the making of the ultimate high-culture artifact -- the Steinway concert grand piano, with a retail price of roughly $100,000 -- might pose a marketing challenge. I dragged my heels on seeing "Note by Note" myself, but I'm here to report that Ben Niles' picture is a fascinating and delightful thing. If anything, it glorifies the working-class craftsmen at the legendary Steinway factory in Astoria, N.Y. (a district of Queens), as the heirs to a nearly dead 19th-century piano-making tradition, rather than the concert pianists who depend on their work.

Mind you, music fans will get plenty for their money here: We hear jazz pianists Kenny Barron, Bill Charlap and Harry Connick Jr. demonstrate what they want in a piano, and observe concert impresarios Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Lang Lang and Hélène Grimaud trying them out, with the critical air you or I might assume while assessing dishwashers at Home Depot. (Lang is hilarious, Aimard comes off like a pompous ass and Grimaud's playing is positively magical.) But "Note by Note" is more than anything a social and cultural portrait, capturing the lonely pride of the 450 Steinway workers who take nearly a year to render raw sheets of timber, piece by piece and step by step, into the most elaborate and precise handcrafted machine made anywhere in the world. (Now playing at Film Forum in New York; other cities may follow.)

"Steal a Pencil for Me" There have been dozens of Holocaust documentaries, and one could well argue that the world doesn't need another. But Michèle Ohayon's "Steal a Pencil for Me" offers a simple human story of dignity, levity and romance -- both unlikely qualities in the chaos and terror of Nazi-era Europe -- and exerts its own special charm. Jakob Polak was a struggling young Amsterdam accountant, in love with a girl named Ina Soep, the beautiful heiress to a diamond-manufacturing family. Ina loved him too, but Jakob was too poor for her family and already married to a jealous woman he no longer loved. Add this domestic soap opera to its setting -- 1943, under Nazi occupation -- and the fact that all three participants in this love triangle were Jewish, and it begins to sound like a pulp novel.

Unlikely as it seems, Jakob, his wife and Ina all wound up in the same concentration camp -- and, luckily for them, that camp was Westerbork, a showcase set up by the Nazis to demonstrate that incarcerated Jews were being treated well. (As Jack Polak quips, Borscht Belt-style, in later life: "I'm a very special Holocaust survivor. I was in the camps with my wife and my girlfriend, and it wasn't easy.") That's only the first in a set of remarkably fortunate occurrences in "Steal a Pencil for Me"; while more than 90 percent of Holland's deported Jews died in the camps, all three of these people, along with their heated little romantic drama, survived the war. It would be idiotic to claim that love saved their lives; plenty of people who loved each other wound up in the crematoria. But somebody had to get lucky, I guess. When you meet Jack and Ina today -- a cultured elderly couple in suburban New York, their European manner and obvious mutual adoration undimmed by time -- and hear them reflect on their history of dignified concentration-camp adultery, you can only be grateful for small mercies. (Opens Nov. 9 at the Quad Cinema in New York and the Laemmle Music Hall in Los Angeles, with more cities to follow.)

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