Inspired, perhaps, by my colleague Jill's trip to the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, I took at look at a number of the documentary offerings at this year's Tribeca Film Festival. As is now evident to nearly everyone, Tribeca is a film festival in search of a mission. Initially created to spur interest in its 9/11-ravaged neighborhood, its lack of artistic focus can be exciting...or irritating. The documentaries this year illustrate the festival's grab-bag approach in startling ways: some brilliance, some entertainment, some noble misfires...and none of it of much consequence to the world film community.

Let's start with fun stuff: the ingratiating film-inside-a-film THE SOUVENIRS OF MR. X, a cheeky tribute to and exploration of Austria's amateur film community. After buying a box of anonymous home movies made in the 1950's and 60's at a street fair, Arash T. Riahi began a semi-serious search to find the auteurs behind them. The films themselves are a mix of family celebrations and choppily-edited features, which leads him ultimately to the Society of Amateur Filmmakers, a hard-to-find club founded in 1927. The elusive "Mr. X" is more symbolic than historic, and the search meanders away into a larger portrait of cinematic doodlers...who are not necessarily filmmakers of poor quality. Destined to be a perpetual (and perennial) festival success, THE SOUVENIRS OF MR. X doesn't really add up to much other than an entertaining glimpse into a geek-fanatic world...similar to Trekkies who love Travis Bickle instead of Captain Kirk.

Quirky personalities and amateurs of all kinds are the stuff of which documentary filmmaking is made of, of course...and Jeffrey Fox Jacobs' A SIDEWALK ASTRONOMER also falls squarely into that quirky territory. Profiling amateur astrologists may not sound like exciting stuff, but their passion and enthusiasm is charming material...especially when directed at John Dobson, the 89-year-old inventor of the Dobsonian telescope mount. His simple, utilitarian design made amateur astronomy possible and affordable, and his reputation as a populist for stargazing is well deserved. The film charts a course through John's evangelical travels to state parks and astronomy clubs, and often jumps into discussions of planets, galaxies, and the Big Bang. While the viewer will probably not learn a great deal about the science of stars from A SIDEWALK ASTRONOMER, they will be hard-pressed to not have a good time.

Some of the films at Tribeca have impressive pedigrees, but none more so that TWO MEN AND A WAR, a film by the 81-year-old Robert Drew. Drew's seminal film of 1962, Primary, followed the presidential race between John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey...and in so doing, helped to launch the film genre known as cinema verite. (His work rests importantly alongside the greats of the field, D.A. Pennebaker and Albert Maysles.) TWO MEN AND A WAR is a memoir of Drew's experiences as a fighter pilot in World War II: his missions, his friendship with the journalist Ernie Pyle, and his near-capture by the Germans. Sadly, however, the misty memories reek of sentimentality, and some very poor reenactment scenes that wouldn't be out of place on America's Most Wanted undercut the impressive archival footage. What tenderness there is is genuine, I suppose, but the film blunts its own effectiveness at every turn.

Much more effective is the often-extraordinary FAVELA RISING, which details the rise of the AfroReggae movement in Brazil's most murderous slums, a world brought to worldwide attention in Fernando Mereilles' Oscar-nominated City of Joy. As a documentary, FAVELA RISING has an authenticity and urgency beyond Mereilles' film, but it lacks the attention to detail of that superior work. Still, the stories of violence are shatteringly told, and the idealism of the movement's leaders, Anderson Sa and Jose Junior, is infectious. As the film reveals itself, the matter-of-fact interviews take on a heroic sheen, and one can't help but find themselves hoping that AfroReggae's mix of hip-hop, street theater, and Brazilian dance will triumph over decades of poverty, violence, and classism. It's a tall order, but FAVELA RISING's thesis -- that music and art can transform a culture -- is well worth the effort.

INFIDELS, Bahman Kiarostami's subdued but powerful documentary about Iran's Godars (gypsies), eloquently speaks to the political power of faith. The Godars are a minority in Iraq, a people of Indian descent whose belief in Animism (that every object has a spirit) was undermined when they were forced to convert to Islam after the 1979 Islamic revolution. Kiarostami, the son of (and frequent film editor for) the renowned director Abbas Kiarostami (The Wind Will Carry Us, A Taste of Cherry), has a masterful eye for images and the patience to allow the Godars to reveal their own idiosyncrasies. As dancers, actors, hunters, and musicians, the Godars use creativity in every aspect of their lives...even as they remain outcasts of Iranian society. INFIDELS is stunning in its simplicity, fascinating in its cultural explication. Film has the ability to introduce us to worlds we never knew existed; Kiarostami harnesses that ability, and reaps enormous rewards.

INFIDELS is being shown at Tribeca with Kiarostami's recent documentary PILGRIMAGE, which follows devout Iranian Shiite Muslims as they travel to the shrine of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the prophet Mohammed who died as a martyr in the seventh century. The problem? The shrine is in Karbala, fifty miles south of Baghdad...and border crossings have been forbidden between Iran and Iraq for decades. Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, however, the crush of illegal pilgrimages by Iranian devotees has grown exponentially...with many dying of dehydration and violence. The Iranian government, for its part, is crushed between two opposing forces: as a Muslim state, it does not want to stand in the way of Islamic ritual, but as a government, it finds it bureaucratically impossible to end its traditional hard line against border crossings. The political, social, and religious maelstrom imbues PILGRIMAGE with a sense of futility and complex emotion, which Kiarostami captures in stark, beautiful, elegiac detail.

In a festival where many of the documentaries trade on the shocking and disturbing, the best of these is THE BROOKLYN CONNECTION, Klaartje Quirijns' portrait of a immigrant construction foreman now living in New York City, having left his native Kosovo many years prior in the middle of its ravaging war against Serbian ethnic cleansing. THE BROOKLYN CONNECTION asks rather pointedly whether the ends justify the means -- the ends being Albanian freedom from oppression, a cause nearly everyone can find worthwhile. But as the film's protagonist buys enormous quantities of weapons at U.S. gun shows, then ships them illegally back to resistance fighters, one's sense of righteousness becomes squirmingly elusive. Terrorism is, after all, determined by perspective...as is patriotism. So when this "freedom fighter" plays both sides of the American political system (writing checks at fundraisers for John Kerry's progressive presidential bid as well as far-right Senator Henry Hyde's pro-gun rally), it becomes painfully resonant that freedom is what one decides it is. The Kosovo rebels are devastatingly clear in their goals and objectives. Morality and justice, however, are far murkier waters to swim in.

-- Gabriel Shanks