As I fly through this really busy week, it's a good time to pick up on a few things I've been meaning to mention and haven't gotten to.

You all know how I enjoy a terrific documentary, and the one sitting on my desk right now is Project Nim. It's freshly out on home video, and the DVD includes a variety of extras, including an audio commentary with director James Marsh (who also did Man On Wire) and a look at other scenes, like the film's footage of Nim's first encounter with another chimp.

We're through awards season, which is a good time to pick up on films and other things that got away from you. While Project Nim didn't make it to an Oscar nomination (quite surprisingly), it did win the DGA (Director's Guild) award and a number of others. It sounds like an odd thing to say, but if you liked Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes and its cautionary tale about why it's not a great idea to try to treat chimps like kids and make them wear pants, here's a rather vivid documentary that makes some of the same points, without the motion-capture.

At Silverdocs last summer, I saw a number of feature-length documentaries that have gotten higher profiles since then: Buck, Project Nim, and Being Elmo among them. But I also saw several programs' worth of short films, most of which are much harder to find.

One of my favorites was Matt Morris' Mr. Happy Man, which is about a man named Johnny Barnes who spends four hours every morning greeting commuters from a traffic roundabout in Bermuda. He has become part of their morning routine, and Morris does a lovely job in a short time of teasing out the stories that help you understand that. (The woman who talks about being in labor is my favorite.)

This is the kind of story that really is best told in a short documentary — you could write about Johnny Barnes and undoubtedly come up with something very evocative (in fact, I'm sure people have), but it's wonderful to actually watch Barnes do his thing, because the sincerity with which he expresses himself has to really be seen, or it could sound rote. And whatever it is, it is not rote.

And now, the film is available for you to watch. So give it a look; it is perfect for a Monday morning.

Enlarge Richard Termine/Sesame Workshop

Elmo and Kevin Clash, photographed on the Sesame Street set in 2006.

Richard Termine/Sesame Workshop

Elmo and Kevin Clash, photographed on the Sesame Street set in 2006.

Note: I covered the documentary Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey when it ran as part of the Silverdocs festival in Washington, D.C. in June. It opens in New York this weekend and in other locations through November and December. Showtimes are listed on the film's web site. It will also come to PBS's Independent Lens series in 2012. This is what I wrote about the film when I saw it; I still recommend it highly.

Being Elmo: A Puppeteer's Journey is a job documentary at heart. You take a person who has a really interesting job that he's very good at — here, playing probably the most popular Muppet to hit Sesame Street since the show premiered — and you look at the road that got him there and what that job is actually like. And even if Elmo is not your thing (as is the case with many adults), it's a very good job documentary.

Kevin Clash, the puppeteer behind Elmo, is a surpassingly lovely guy by all indications, as you know if you heard him play Not My Job on Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me! in 2006. To watch him put Elmo on his arm and greet children — as he did after the documentary screening Tuesday night — is to see a deeply gifted performer in action. Elmo can say to a kid, "Elmo loves you. Now go home!" and it feels warm to the child and dryly funny to the parent. Clash was right on the edge of cracking himself up a few times as Elmo greeted kids who looked surprisingly old (or "tall," as Elmo put it) for an Elmo meet-and-greet, which was lovely to see. The guy still makes himself laugh talking in silly voices, and that says a lot about his continued success, I think.

The heroes of Being Elmo, in some ways, are Clash's parents, who never blinked at his burgeoning interest in building and operating puppets — which had, by the time he was in high school, gotten him working at a local Baltimore TV station on a kids' show. They supported him, they didn't fret about the fact that he didn't go to college because he went straight from high school to New York for work, and at least one person in the film takes the position that Elmo's open and limitless love of children is not, as many believe, an embodiment of Clash himself, but of his mom and dad.

Certainly, Being Elmo is not as daring or hard-hitting as some of the other films screening at Silverdocs, but there are some very important takeaways here. Not only about the parents who encouraged without judging, but about the daughter who was smart enough to recognize at about 15 that her incredibly busy dad wasn't spending as much time with her as she wanted and to ask him to spend more before she left for college — which he did. And about the bosses at Channel 2 in Baltimore who, despite their love of his work and the fact that they'd discovered a very young genius in his field, pushed him out the door to bigger opportunities, because it was the right thing to do for him. And about Kermit Love, the master puppetmaker who made Clash his personal project and introduced him to Jim Henson.

A lot of the film is really about how a person with talent takes ultimate responsibility for his own progress on the one hand but is mentored and guided by other people on the other. You can identify these very important moments in Clash's life, almost like checkpoints: turning down a job offer from Henson for The Dark Crystal because he had two television series going, only to see them both canceled, which led him to work with Henson on Labyrinth; persevering with Elmo after a very experienced Sesame Street puppeteer had thrown him down in disgust; going to visit Love in New York and discovering all the materials he'd been doing without in making his own puppets. There are big nods to mentoring, to persevering, and to returning favors that have been given to you — including a fantastic sequence near the end in which Clash meets a kid who comes off very much like the Kevin Clash of the future.

(Be warned: the documentary includes some of the footage of Henson's funeral that's been seen widely on YouTube, and it may very well make you cry all over yourself.) (I'm not kidding: that clip is NOT FOR THE FAINT OF HEART.)

It's a fairly straightforward but very good documentary about the translation of talent into a livelihood, and it's very much worth seeing when you can — it's getting a theatrical release, but if that doesn't work, it will be easy to find on video down the line.

Enlarge ESPN

A screen grab from ESPN Films Catching Hell, Alex Gibney's look at the story of Steve Bartman.

ESPN

A screen grab from ESPN Films Catching Hell, Alex Gibney's look at the story of Steve Bartman.

The best documentaries to come out of what was the ESPN 30 For 30 series and is now just ESPN Films are not necessarily the ones that are pure sports stories. They're the ones that have used sports as a way to look at mass culture, including The Two Escobars, which wove together drugs and soccer, and the outstanding June 17, 1994, which followed the many big sports stories that broke on the same day O.J. Simpson made his famous run in the white Bronco.

Another perfect example is Catching Hell, an excellent film premiering tonight in which filmmaker Alex Gibney revisits the story of Steve Bartman, the Cubs fan who became Chicago's Public Enemy Number One after being blamed for interfering with a catch and dashing the Cubs' hopes of advancing to the World Series.

Of course, had fielder Moises Alou made the catch, it would have been the second out in the eighth inning, not the final out of the game. Of course, Bartman didn't make the Cubs go on to give up eight runs. Of course, that particular play was a foul ball that advanced no runner and gave up no run in and of itself. Of course, several other fans did basically the same thing Bartman did. None of that mattered, though — Bartman was vilified to the point where he was escorted from the game by security and later received police protection. He issued a public apology, but has never really reemerged.

Enlarge Courtesy of Robert Stewart

Brad Crowder and David McKay at the 2008 Republican National Convention. They were later arrested and charged with domestic terrorism.

Courtesy of Robert Stewart

Brad Crowder and David McKay at the 2008 Republican National Convention. They were later arrested and charged with domestic terrorism.

Better This World, a documentary film premiering tonight on PBS's POV series and streaming online beginning tomorrow, is part conspiracy thriller, part mystery, part drama, and, in the end, part disaster movie.

While it's about what happened to two political protestors accused of manufacturing (but not using) Molotov cocktails during the 2008 Republican National Convention, and while — make no mistake — it is fundamentally a full-throated argument that they were treated very unfairly, that's not primarily because the filmmakers argue in favor of either their politics or their tactics in and of themselves. The central questions the film raises are neither about whether their cause was noble nor about whether throwing Molotov cocktails as a form of political dissent is justified. Instead, the film looks at the cases of Brad Crowder and David McKay the way one might analyze a disaster — one in which they most certainly played a role, but, the film argues, other people did, too.

Enlarge Patrick Eagar/Silverdocs

In this 1976 match between England and the West Indies, the team celebrates the dismissal of Tony Greig.

Patrick Eagar/Silverdocs

In this 1976 match between England and the West Indies, the team celebrates the dismissal of Tony Greig.

Some documentaries get theatrical releases, some make it to HBO or PBS, and some eventually do well on Netflix. But there are other avenues, too, and it's not always easy to know where to find the ones that are a little off the (American) radar. A great example of that problem is the cricket documentary Fire In Babylon.

The film was in theaters in the UK, and it screened at Silverdocs last week and at the Tribeca Film Festival in April. But as it turns out, you can have it, too! Right now, you can find it on iTunes (where it costs $6.99 to rent) or, depending on your cable provider, you may currently be able to find it for rent through your on-demand options as part of a special sports festival Tribeca is running. (I didn't realize it was on my cable system until I typed my cable provider into this search.) It's a great example of a movie that's actually found itself a pretty good home, quite frankly, but a home that you wouldn't necessarily find unless you were looking. So I'm suggesting you look.

As for the film itself: When I say "cricket documentary," perhaps you envision something very, very tame. Perhaps about drinking tea. You should not.

Fire In Babylon is the story of the West Indian team that, in the mid-1970s, became the overwhelmingly dominant power in their sport — a sport that was, of course, very British. Since many of the Caribbean countries that are part of the West Indies confederation saw the British primarily as a white colonial power, the politics of a high-octane cricket team made up of black players from places like Barbados and Guyana were pretty ... layered.

How layered? Well, Tony Greig, a white South African playing for England, thought it would be a good idea to try to intimidate the West Indians by vowing to "make them grovel." Without going into great detail about how much you can fire people up with just the right rhetoric, and without adopting as a general proposition that you can broadly quote from Wikipedia entries and hope to get good content, allow me to quote from Greig's Wikipedia entry, because I really can't improve upon it in describing what happens in the film: "Rarely has an attempt to psyche out an opposition failed so spectacularly."

Becoming the dominant team in cricket was, as one player says in the trailer, "like slaves whipping the asses of masters."

But as much as it's about politics and race, Fire In Babylon is also about a changing sport. The members of the West Indian team saw firsthand the power of "fast bowling" — in cricket-newbie terms, throwing the ball so hard and getting it to bounce in such a way that guys got hurt, jumped out of the way, or both — when they played Australia and faced a couple of legendary Australian fast bowlers who pretty much flattened them. But when they picked up the technique themselves and used it against England, they found themselves classified as bullies and (sigh) savages. (Incidentally, my notes say, verbatim, "Never realized how freaking brutal cricket is.")

Accompanied by terrific calypso music, including songs that were written about the team and its members as it rose to power, Fire In Babylon is a terrific sports underdog story as well as an intriguing look at the politics of competitions between nations, no matter how divorced from politics they might seem.

Enlarge HBO

The new documentary Hot Coffee presents filmmaker Susan Saladoff's impassioned arguments on four aspects of the civil justice system.

HBO

The new documentary Hot Coffee presents filmmaker Susan Saladoff's impassioned arguments on four aspects of the civil justice system.

Question: What do you think is the most famous lawsuit of the last 50 years that didn't involve an already-famous person?

My guess is that it might be the case of Stella Liebeck. If Stella's name doesn't ring a bell, maybe "McDonald's coffee" does.

The Liebeck case became a legend largely because the narrative that became popular had three basic elements that people quite reasonably found galling in combination: (1) A trivial injury (spilling coffee on yourself); (2) resulting from a ridiculously foolish act (driving with a cup of coffee between your legs), for which (3) someone set out to get rich (the jury awarded Stella $2.9 million).

Airing tonight at 9:00 p.m. on HBO, the new documentary Hot Coffee argues, among other things, that all three of those elements of the popular narrative were fundamentally false. It shows gasp-inducing photographs of Liebeck's third-degree burns, which required hospitalization and multiple skin grafts; it clarifies that she (in the passenger seat) and her grandson (in the driver's seat) were parked in the McDonald's parking lot, and were not driving, when the coffee spilled; and it extensively quotes Liebeck's attorney and family on the fact that her initial request to McDonald's was merely to have them pay the part of her out-of-pocket medical expenses that weren't covered by Medicare.

(As a side note, it's also interesting to hear Liebeck's daughter say that when it first happened, the family assumed that in order for the spill to inflict the injuries it did, the pot must have malfunctioned or been cranked up higher than it was supposed to be, so they didn't anticipate that having the company cover her medical expenses would be particularly controversial. They sort of assumed that third-degree burns would be evidence that something wasn't done the way it was meant to be done, which didn't turn out to be so.)

There are other aspects of the Liebeck case that are explored in the film — which played at last week's Silverdocs festival in Silver Spring, Md. — including the fact that the judge reduced the award and the problems the jury had with some of the testimony McDonald's provided. But the aim of filmmaker Susan Saladoff is, at least in part, to offer a counterargument to a narrative she believes has fundamentally changed the way people perceive the civil justice system, in spite of the fact that it isn't what actually happened.

Understand: Saladoff is an advocate, and she was, when she presented the film at Silverdocs, clear and unapologetic about the fact that Hot Coffee is an opinionated argument, not a dispassionate recitation of facts. She's trained as a litigator herself, and she's angry about the four topics she tackles here: false (or partly false, or exaggerated) narratives about particular lawsuits, legislative caps on the damages an injured person can collect notwithstanding the extent of the injury, the influencing of judicial elections in order to have those legislative caps upheld in court, and the use of mandatory arbitration in consumer and employment contracts.

She's also a brand-new filmmaker, and that shows in the simplicity of the presentation. This isn't a documentary that's made with any particular effort at cinematic style — and the good news about that is that HBO is as good a place to see it as any. (Even before I learned that Hot Coffee would be airing on TV, I would have told you it looked like TV.)

There are a lot of pieces to the Liebeck case alone, and the misunderstandings of the facts are not all there is to it. Not everyone who fully understands the facts of the case agrees that she should have recovered anything — some judges have thrown out similar cases, and some juries haven't awarded damages in similar cases. But it is true that seeing the film makes the case look different than it does if you are under the impression she was flying down the highway with a teetering cup of coffee in her lap.

Showing the pictures of Liebeck's burns doesn't suddenly resolve all debate over the case. But if people are going to have strong opinions about whether she should have collected anything and what that means about how courts work (which many people do), at least Hot Coffee gives them an opportunity to base those opinions on the original story, rather than on jokes from Seinfeld, which can happen when a case becomes such a fable that the perception of it is based on the equivalent of tenth-generation photocopies of what actually happened.

Saladoff told the Silverdocs audience of Hot Coffee, "It's my truth." Indeed, there are other people who undoubtedly would (and do) make other arguments from the same sets of facts. But when the maker of a documentary is straightforward about the fact that she's staking out a position, it's kind of refreshing: When you know that, you don't walk out of the theater thinking you've supposedly been presented with every argument. This is just her argument, and she offers her evidence to support it. What you do with it, and the degree to which you are persuaded, is up to you.

Enlarge Silverdocs

Buck Brannaman deals with "horses with people problems" in the new documentary Buck.

Silverdocs

Buck Brannaman deals with "horses with people problems" in the new documentary Buck.

I thought it might be fun to take a moment out of Silverdocs 2011 to talk about a movie that you may actually be able to see! At a local theater! Soon! Maybe even now!

I'm exaggerating, of course: There will certainly be others with theatrical releases (I saw Page One here — that's the one about The New York Times — and that's certainly around), and you'll be able to see many if not most of them sooner or later. But this is a very fine film that I encourage you to seek out if you can find it. It's playing in the D.C. area starting today (over in Bethesda), but it's rolling out in a bunch of places, and you can look for a theater near you that might be showing it here.

If you read about Buck, the most prominent words you may hear are "horse whisperer." DON'T PANIC.

Enlarge Silverdocs

The Bully Project follows stories of several kids who are being bullied or have been bullied.

Silverdocs

The Bully Project follows stories of several kids who are being bullied or have been bullied.

Director Lee Hirsch started filming The Bully Project in 2009, about a year before bullying fully came of age as a high-profile crisis with the launch of what became the It Gets Better project. (That's not to say that's when bullying started, obviously — it's when the current wave of popular media coverage swelled after several awful stories of suicides by bullied kids.)

What The Bully Project adds to the public conversation is an unflinching look at the stakes. At its center is the family of Tyler Long, a 17-year-old who had just recently hanged himself in a closet when filming started. It follows his anguished parents as they launch a community discussion of bullying in the wake of his death that it certainly appears the school doesn't want to have (they organize a town hall meeting, and plenty of kids and parents show up, but nobody from the school or the district).

The film also follows Alex, a 14-year-old who can be funny and comfortable at home, but who has been so relentlessly brutalized at school (his special zone of torment seems to be the bus) that he walks around looking shell-shocked and a bit lost, which seems to isolate him even more.

There are other kids in the story: Kelby, a young lesbian from Oklahoma whose father explains that after she came out, people he'd known for years started refusing to acknowledge him on the street; Ja'meya, a 14-year-old whose very difficult path represents the dangers of and to bullied kids who get fed up and decide to fight back; and Ty Field-Smalley, whose suicide at 11 years old — 11 years old — drives his father, too, into activism.

At times, The Bully Project is a pretty grueling experience, but it probably wouldn't be fair if it weren't. And it isn't only the bullying that's frustrating: We see Alex's parents try to take their concerns (which are amplified after the filmmakers conclude that they're obligated to tell them what's happening on the bus) to the school. There, they have a bizarre meeting with an administrator who gives them precisely the pacifying "we'll take care of it" speech that many of the parents in the film say they hear all the time right before nothing happens.

Unfortunately, by that point in the film, we've already seen that same administrator intervene in what certainly smells like a bullying situation by forcing the two boys involved to shake hands and later telling the one who's complaining of being bullied that if he doesn't shake hands and make up and really mean it, he's just as bad as the bully. (She really says this. It's almost surreal.)

It gives you a sense of what these families feel like they're up against, although in fairness, the schools are up against quite a lot themselves. There's a point where a local official tells the Longs that it's extraordinarily difficult for the school to single-handedly stop destructive behaviors by a kid whose parents are reinforcing those behaviors at home. To the Longs, it feels (very understandably) like blame-shifting and refusing to do anything, but I felt some sympathy for the school, too, because ... it's probably true.

There aren't any suggestions of easy solutions in The Bully Project; it's more about driving home the need for everybody to keep trying by just standing as a reminder of what's at stake. Kelby's father says at one point that he never understood the expression "you never know what someone's been through until you've walked a mile in their shoes" until he had a gay child. The Bully Project can't let you walk a mile in any of these people's shoes, not by a longshot. But it can let you look at those shoes up close, maybe try them on. It's not fun, but it's well worth doing.

Note: The film has an online home at TheBullyProject.com, where there are extensive links to resources for kids and parents dealing with bullying and to the "grassroots movement" the film is intended to spur.

Enlarge Silverdocs

While most of Bob And The Monster is a straightforward documentary, it employs a couple of stop-motion animation sequences.

Silverdocs

While most of Bob And The Monster is a straightforward documentary, it employs a couple of stop-motion animation sequences.

Bob And The Monster is an insightful, very interesting documentary about Bob Forrest, a musician turned unconventional drug counselor.

At this point, you fall into one of three categories. Many of you are saying, "Bob who?" Some of you are saying, "Wait, Bob Forrest who was the lead singer of Thelonious Monster?" And some of you are saying, "Wait, Bob Forrest who's the down-to-earth counselor on Celebrity Rehab With Dr. Drew?"

Yes! Bob Forrest.

The film tells the story of how Forrest moved restlessly in the creative scene of Los Angeles in the early 1980s until he set himself up with the band Thelonious Monster, which never became a huge popular success, but which worked closely with bands that did — especially the Red Hot Chili Peppers, whose members speak at length about their experiences with Forrest, whom they count as a close pal.

Later, Forrest got clean and became a drug counselor, largely through his association with the Musicians Assistance Program, a program formed by jazz musician (and longtime heroin addict) Buddy Arnold to help musicians get off drugs. Frustrated by the limitations of what he sees as a deeply corporatized and broken recovery "industry," Forrest recently struck out on his own to start a clinic in Hollywood. There, he says, he won't yell at and judge and berate people who are in recovery as he says was done to him in most of the 20 or 30 rehabs he tried before he finally got off heroin.

Now, the tricky part for the filmmakers is that along the way, Forrest met Dr. Drew "Dr. Drew" Pinsky, who recognized his gift for working with people and gave him some formal education in the biology and psychology of addiction. Forrest became a critical part of the team that Pinsky used in his own work — the work that's chronicled, among other things, on Celebrity Rehab, where Forrest has appeared for several seasons. Through being heavily featured on that show (often as the guy who goes out and tracks down people who are in the worst possible situations), Forrest has become sort of "reality-show famous," if we can use that expression.

The fact that he is moderately famous now for appearing on a widely reviled but popular television show appears nowhere in the film. The show — the fact of the show, the fact that he's well-known for the show, the fact that he has ever been on television as a counselor — isn't even mentioned.

Enlarge Silverdocs

Two women relax under the hair dryers in the delightful Blue Rinse.

Silverdocs

Two women relax under the hair dryers in the delightful Blue Rinse.

If I were to list the documentaries I see at Silverdocs in order of the likelihood that you (not you, but an average you) will actually see them, we'd probably group them something like: (1) Ones that will get reasonably wide theatrical releases plus Netflix/DVD/cable, (2) ones that will get limited theatrical releases plus Netflix/DVD/cable, (3) ones that will be on Netflix/DVD/cable, (4) ones that will be on a DVD you have to order online, and (5) the shorts.

And it's a shame, too, because short films are often utterly delightful, and until people get more accustomed to buying them on iTunes or taking advantage of some other distribution method, they're never going to be seen very much, except by hard-core Oscar completists – and that's still only a handful.

So having seen my first batch of shorts this morning, I thought I'd use the ones I saw as a little introduction. These were grouped together under the heading "Between Us," which purportedly meant they were intimate stories of people, and which actually meant I cried a lot.

Blue Rinse. I apologize for using the word "adorable" to describe a movie about elderly Irish ladies, because I know that a lot of them would hate it, but Blue Rinse is indeed an adorable little film that eavesdrops on older women in a Dublin salon as they get their hair done. It doesn't sound like much, but it packs a lot into an 11-minute running time: how the women confide in their hairdressers, how they equate upkeep of their personal appearance with maintaining independence, and some gorgeous super-close-up photography that vividly conveys the tactile and very personal experience of having your hair gently washed, cut, or just touched by other people.

Silverdocs

An image promoting Oh My God, Dear God, though not one that's in the film.

Enlarge Silverdocs

Marketa Irglova and Glen Hansard in The Swell Season, which opened the Silverdocs festival Monday night.

Silverdocs

Marketa Irglova and Glen Hansard in The Swell Season, which opened the Silverdocs festival Monday night.

Consider the discontented viewer.

We live in this hypothetical person's golden age, when the complaints he used to share with patient friends can now be shared with the entire online world, and they may even make their way to the eyeballs of the creators of the entertainment he's so angry about. Unsatisfying season finale? Terrible third act of a movie? Too much lens flare? Tweet, tweet, tweet!

I'm convinced that we have so many methods of conveying resistance that they feed resistance itself, and while we resist bad performances and continuity errors and tragic hair, what we often resist the most in enjoying works of fiction is being told the wrong story. This person should have ended up with that love interest instead of that one; nothing happened in this episode; that character didn't have a believable motivation for taking that particular action. That's not what should have happened.

As a work of fiction, The Swell Season, the documentary about the band of the same name that opened the Silverdocs film festival in Silver Spring, Md., on Monday night, would have been the wrong story to a lot of people. That's because what happens is, at one level, completely unsatisfying. The sketch goes like this: Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova make the practically no-budget movie Once, it becomes an indie hit, they win an Oscar for Best Original Song for the beautiful "Falling Slowly," they give enormously memorable speeches, and they go from playing smallish venues to playing Radio City. And of course, they fall in love.

And it doesn't work out.

The film, from directors Nick August-Perna, Chris Dapkins, and Carlo Mirabella-Davis, doesn't point fingers about any one dramatic reason why it doesn't work out. There are, as there often are, lots of reasons. She's very young — the movie was filmed over a couple of years, but she's roughly 19 when a lot of it is happening, and he's in his mid-thirties and left school at 13 to make music, so they're in wildly different stages of both their lives and their careers. They react to the sudden onslaught of attention from strangers totally differently. And you sense that the same huge, passionate reactions to everything that make him so charismatic also sometimes make her tired.

It's just ... not quite going to work out.

But what's lovely about it — and ultimately very satisfying — is that it's a busted romance, not a busted love story.

Enlarge Ben Keller/AFI Silver

Last year's Silverdocs opening night featured a long line.

Ben Keller/AFI Silver

Last year's Silverdocs opening night featured a long line.

At the risk of using a word that doesn't seem to have a lot of meaning: I expect this to be a fun week at Monkey See.

I've spoken before about my abiding love of my local kinda-art-house-kinda-just-cool theater, the AFI Silver, and it's a special week there. This is the week that the AFI, along with Discovery (which is also located in Silver Spring) hosts Silverdocs, a film festival that will run through next weekend. As a big fan of documentaries, it's something I'm quite looking forward to.

(How much are they toying with me? Tonight's opening-night showcase is a new film about The Swell Season, a band that — as regular readers know — I also adore.)

There are some relatively high-profile movies on the docket, including the puppeteer bio Being Elmo, the New York Times doc Page One (which is just opening around the country now), and The Interrupters from Steve James (who made Hoop Dreams). But there are also things that look intriguing that I'd never heard of until I saw the slate, including Age Of Champions, about senior citizen athletes, and The Loving Story, about the couple whose Supreme Court case overturned laws against interracial marriage.

I'll be seeing shorts, foreign documentaries, and all nature of things, and we'll be talking about lots and lots of different aspects of the form and the business both. Feel free to browse the full slate and tell me what you're interested in, and we'll see what fits into my increasingly packed schedule for the week.