I can immediately think of two primary types of artist biopics. The first is largely dependent on dramatic irony. You know (and really, the film knows) that Will is going to grow up to be Shakespeare or Ms. Austen is going to become Jane, and so every event is infused with significance. These films appeal to the vanity of the informed viewer. (I’m not saying that is all they do or that they are all necessarily bad for doing so.) Because I know who John Webster is, I take delight in the joke that is unexplained. Because I’m familiar with the plays or paintings or novels, I am instinctively a half second ahead of the reveal and feel smart. And make no mistake, people who watch movies like to feel smart; even if they know they are being pandered to on some levels.

The films at this year’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival were varied in their subject matter. There were advocates of weather modification, a history of the American-Indian Movement, and a portrait of the exiled queen of Iran. We saw Jews in the city of Thessaloniki, troop greeters in the city of Bangor, advertising executives on Madison avenue, and Christian prison administrators in Argentina. There was a reporter in Africa trying to get us to remember Darfur and a father in America who was either trying to remember anything or forget everything. There was a blind couple using music to communicate love, a deaf boy at the center of a very loud controversy, and a horde of mute Japanese-American detainees whose only voice was a stranger’s camera. Oh, and there was Superman–turns out he’s Muslim and he lives in India.