When I think back on 2009, the phrase that comes to mind is “top heavy.”

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.