Oct 23, 2011 Check out the Stranger than Fiction series at: Director Steve James discusses his film STEVIE, which. Documentary 'Stevie' Paints a Picture of Pedophile's Unfortunate Upbringing. Steve James, the documentarian. After watching the documentary.

I’ve been wanting to start up a column on documentary classics for a while now but couldn’t decide what film to start with. Powerplay Manager Tools Feedback. Yesterday I watched Steve James’ “Stevie” for the first time, and — oh yeah — this is the one. Less than ten years old, it might seem too new a film to be considered a “classic.” Docs tend to age a lot quicker than fiction films, though, with only a few years needed to determine if they’re permanent must-see works or momentary imperatives that quickly become outdated.

A more obvious and easy choice would be James’ “Hoop Dreams,” and certainly it deserves a discussion here in the future. However, I partly wish to recommend lesser known films requiring more attention, either than what they received to begin with or than they have had since. As we await the release of James’ latest nonfiction masterpiece, “The Interrupters” (out in NYC July 29), as well as what is being called retrospective of some of the filmmaker’s work (including this film, which screens at the IFC Center tonight as part of ), it’s a great time to get acquainted with an undervalued documentarian and what’s undoubtedly his most narratively and ethically complex achievement.

In fact, “Stevie” is one of the most narratively and ethically complex docs ever. It’s incredibly rich and challenging and emotionally difficult.

In short, it’s absolutely brilliant. “Stevie” presents a first-person story, in which James returns to Southern Illinois to reconnect with the young man he mentored ten years earlier as a Big Brother. Mostly the film is about this eponymous young man, an ex-foster child dealing with a complicated family dynamic and sudden yet unsurprising criminal charges. Pc Pettersson Und Findus Download Itunes on this page.

On the surface it appears to be your usual look at poor white eccentrics and miscreants, typical popular subjects for documentary cinema worldwide. But it’s a biography inside of an autobiography and in the end it’s really James’ struggle we’re dealing with. At times it feels so personal, particularly on moral and visceral levels, that it’s amazing he was able to compile the doc with a clear head. I presume co-editor William Haugse (with whom James shares an earlier editing Oscar nomination) must have been an enormous help at the steering wheel of this one. In part I see the film as an unintentional condemning of mentoring organizations like Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, but for that I also have to see equal issue with foster care and, well, a lot of documentary filmmaking.

James had personally recommended his own film to me after a discussion we had about documentarians’ relationships with their subjects after the camera is turned off. “Stevie” deals in this issue somewhat metaphorically because the reunion between Steve and Stevie is similar to what a reunion between filmmaker and film subject is like. As is another sequence in the doc where Stevie reconnects with his first and favorite foster parents after fifteen years out of touch. What is the responsibility of all these people to the person they once completely focused on, and is it more detrimental than beneficial to the “Little Brothers,” the foster kids and the film subjects, enough that these relationships are not even worth having to begin with? For raising such a question, “Stevie” easily reminded me of Nick Broomfield’s “Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer,” which came out shortly after “Stevie” and more literally deals with a filmmaker revisiting a prior subject ten years later (the first film was “Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer”) and experiencing all kinds of inner turmoil as a result.