Catfish
Melbourne International Film Festival, 07/08/2010
Status: Behind by 13 films
I do love a good documentary - one that surprises as it unfolds, one with a story so compelling I wouldn’t believe it unless the cameras had happened to capture it, one like Catfish.
NEV SCHULMAN is a photographer living in New York, sharing an office space with film-makers REL (who is also his brother) and HENRY JOOST. Rel and Henry turn their camers on Nev to document his new and intense relationship with an 8 year-old artist named Abby and her family (conducted mostly on Facebook). Things quickly get strange. Interestingly, complexly, astoundingly strange. It's not so much the story itself as the way it's told that's so well done.
I find it's often problematic when documentarians puts themselves in the picture (David Attenborough aside, of course), but for Catfish it’s not only okay, it’s integral to the point. It helps that there is no Blair Witch Project-style to-camera monologues, and that they are honest about what to include in the doco. Much like The Red Chapel, they included some scenes that make them look callous or petty, but which turn out to be emotionally or narratively important to the story.
A chap in the cinema didn’t believe this could be a real doco - the story was to neat, too amazing and too well-told. I think that these are some very talented young film-makers and they had their camera pointed in the right place at the right time. I really do love a good documentary.
