Jun 13, 2008  |  By: GREG MARZULLO  | COMMENTS     

Washington boasts a daunting cultural calendar, but one of the year’s top events is Silverdocs, the AFI and Discovery Channel Documentary Festival. This international slate of documentary films, now in its sixth year, has grown considerably during its tenure at the AFI Silver Theatre, so much so that this year’s festival has added days and increased screening venues.

The Silverdocs programmers whittled down almost 2,000 submissions to 108 eight films from 63 countries, and the movies run the gamut from the political to the sacred and the delightfully profane.

This year’s opening film is “All Together Now,” a backstage look at the creative process for “Love,” a Beatles-inspired Cirque du Soleil stage production at Las Vegas’ Mirage hotel, so those with a penchant for the Brit band’s music and the brilliant artistry of the visionary circus should check it out on opening night, Monday, June 16, when director Adrian Wills is scheduled to attend.

Of equal interest is the closing night film, “Theater of War,” which also follows artists in the creation of a very different type of show — George C. Wolfe’s 2006 outdoor performance of “Mother Courage and Her Children,” starring Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline. The film, screening on June 21, looks at the connections between art, war and capitalism. Special guests are expected, but haven’t been announced.

Each year, Silverdocs honors a notable filmmaker for his or her contribution to the documentary oeuvre, and this year’s honoree is Spike Lee. The festival will screen “When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts,” about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, “4 Little Girls,” a chronicle of the bombing of a black church that killed four girls during the civil rights movement, and “We Wuz Robbed,” following the drama of the 2000 presidential election. On June 19, Lee will be interviewed by Denver Post film critic Lisa Kennedy after a screening of clips from his documentaries.

EACH YEAR, SILVERDOCS includes a handful of films with direct queer content (last year’s “Super Amigos” is one of the best gay-related documentaries of all time), and this year’s offerings, though few, are rich and provocative in content and cultural analysis.

Of real historical interest is “An American Family” and its attendant follow-up documentary “Lance Loud!”

Long before today’s so-called reality shows, PBS was the first to follow a group of people in verité style through their regular ups-and-downs. The 12-hour series, which aired in 1973, was “An American Family,” and it captured the lives of the Loud family and their attendant dramas, including the divorce of the parents and the coming out of the eldest son, Lance.

He’s reportedly the first real person to come out on television in so clear a fashion, and he was roundly vilified for it (as was the series in some quarters). The not-always-so-liberal New York Times called him “the evil flower of the family,” but he was heralded as a hero by many gay people who had never seen their image on the small screen coming from a real family.

Silverdocs will show the entire series, so you can see lots of Lance in his ’70s bliss, but make sure not to miss “Lance Loud!” (screening Friday, June 20, 9 a.m.) which captures Lance during his dying days in California. After decades of struggling with drug addiction (while somehow still writing columns for high-profile magazines, including Vanity Fair and the Advocate), Lance finally succumbed to AIDS and hepatitis.

The original PBS series’ filmmakers, Alan and Susan Raymond, got a call from Lance in 2001 saying that he was nearing the end and wanted them to film it all. What follows is a touching and often-heartbreaking portrait of a life that was lived blissfully, but also went horribly awry.

Shots of the exhausted Lance, succumbing to his ailments and walking timidly with a cane at only 50 years old, are paired with archival footage of the vibrant man in his 20s who was the frontman for a popular (and given the clips a fantastic) band in ’70s New York, the Mumps.

Lance says he injected speed for 20 years and even injected rat poison when he was out of his drug of choice, slipping into drug-induced furors because he had “given up on life,” but now that he was dying he deeply regretted his choices.

This perhaps is the emotional crux of the film — regret, and not just Lance’s. His father, Bill, was not supportive of his son’s sexual orientation, saying in one clip that he “detest[s] his way of life.” Yet, during a 2002 ...