When the days grow longer and lazier, the thought of staying inside to watch a brilliant, transformative documentary seems less enticing. You long to savor the summer season relaxing at a pleasant island getaway. But you want to do it guilt-free.
The Nantucket Film Festival (June 22-27) offers a solution. Best known for focusing on the work of screenwriters, the event also features an outstanding selection of documentaries.
One of those documentaries, appropriately enough, focuses on a writer. Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady’s “Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You,’’ tells the story of the TV legend who created such groundbreaking shows as “All in the Family,’’ “Maude,’’ “Good Times,’’ and “The Jeffersons.’’
Roger Ross Williams’s “Life, Animated’’ proves something that we’ve always suspected: Disney animation has therapeutic qualities. That’s what Ron Suskind discovered when his autistic son Owen showed marked improvement in his condition after repeatedly watching “The Little Mermaid,’’ “Aladdin,’’ and “Peter Pan.’’
Perhaps the festival’s award for best title, weirdest topic, and most appropriate format should go to Penny Lane’s “Nuts!’’ It’s about Dr. John Romulus Brinkley, a 1920s physician who made a fortune transplanting goat testicles onto humans (male and female) as a cure for everything from impotence to dementia to flatulence. He then created what was at the time the country’s most powerful radio station. And then he ran for governor of Kansas, twice. These days, he could run for president. Unsurprisingly, this mind-bending doc is animated.
Finally, no documentary program should be without the presence of Oliver Stone, who, if he does not make documentary films per se, challenges our notions of what is fiction and nonfiction with demi-doc provocations such as “JFK’’ (1991), “Nixon’’ (1995), and, most likely, his upcoming “Snowden’’ (it has a Sept. 15 release date). He will be honored with the festival’s 2016 Screenwriters Tribute Award.
Stone will have an onstage conversation with award-winning documentarian Eugene Jarecki (“Why We Fight,’’ “Freakonomics’’). Maybe they can clear up where the truth ends and the invention begins — or if, indeed, such a distinction exists.
For more information about the Nantucket Film Festival go to www.nantucketfilmfestival .org
Documenting destiny
Has legendary investigative filmmaker Joe Berlinger, who with his late partner Bruce Sinofsky made three films over a period of years successfully exonerating three teenagers falsely convicted of murdering three children in the “Paradise Lost Trilogy’’ (1996-2011), met his match with the formidable Tony Robbins? Has the brawny 6-foot-7-inch life coach with the Jesse Ventura voice overcome the hardnosed filmmaker’s skepticism?
Berlinger has taken on the challenge and for his new documentary, “Tony Robbins: I Am Not Your Guru,’’ was given unlimited access to the speaker and best-selling author’s 2014 “Date With Destiny,’’ an annual revival meeting/self-help extravaganza that has apparently transformed the lives of thousands of followers. The result might be one of Berlinger’s most revelatory films yet, a summer must-see when it debuts July 15 on Netflix.
For more information go to www.netflix.com/title/ 80102204.
Peter Keough can be reached at petervkeough@gmail.com.
