On the road again...
Friday night, Barrie and I attended a screening of Big Rig at the SILVERDOCS Film Festival. Full disclosure — I could NEVER be a film critic, because I walk into every movie expecting it to have flaws but to love it anyway, and this documentary was no exception. I immediately fell for everything about it, from the truckers and their rigs to the graphics charting highways and introducing the truckers' names. But as we discussed the film on our way back to NPR HQ, I learned a lot from Barrie about what it really means to watch a documentary with a critical eye. Though I'll still say I loved the film, I now realize the film left me with a lot of unanswered questions about trucking, aspects the film touched on like rules regulating time behind the wheel, the pay structure for truckers, and the evolution of the industry from independently owned and operated rigs to corporate drivers. It made me wonder about the goals of documentary filmmaking: must they always inform? Is it ok to just put the stories on the screen, or must the documentarian also provide all the context as well? Obviously, the answer lies somewhere in between... now I've got a bunch of Googling to do, and that doesn't really bother me... but is a film that just sends viewers straight to Google a film that needs more facts to bolster the storytelling?
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