Documentaries are particularly emphasized this year, including two sidebars focusing one on immigration and the visual arts. The artists profiled are Hugues de Montalembert, who lost his eyesight during an attack in New York City; Tina Barney, the Rhode Island-based photographer of the upper classes; Purvis Young, who taught himself to paint while in prison; and photographer Sally Mann, controversial for her poses of adolescent girls and her own pre-adolescent children.

Immigration-related films include Maquilapolis, dealing with sweatshops just over the Mexican border; The Other Side, which examines the hopes and fears of potential immigrants; and Crossing Arizona, about the deadly human smuggling situation on the Mexico border.

Opening the festival is Quinceanera, which won both the dramatic grand jury prize and the audience award at the Sundance Film Festival in January. Set in the Los Angeles Chicano community, the family drama deals with the traditional Mexican passage into womanhood. The closing night film is Champions, a comedy about three dysfunctional men trying to prove their manhood on a week in the countryside.

Individual tickets are $10; opening and closing night films are $20 (discount passes are available). The box office at 17 Touro Street will open at noon on June 2. Further information is available at 401.851.6963 and www.newportfilmfestival.com.

Features
The 15 narrative features this year range from four children’s films, including one about a kid brother who turns into a dog, to the seriousness of The Road to Guantanamo, about three British citizens held for two years in the prison without charges. To give a sense of the variety, here are four films that run the storytelling gamut from the horrific to the hilarious.

13 (Tzameti) (France, 2005)
Thursday, June 8 | 9:30 pm | Jane Pickens
Saturday, June 10 | 9:30 pm | Opera House 2
This gritty black-and-white thriller took the World Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at Sundance this year. Written and directed by Georgian emigre Gela Babluani, the film makes the mystery of where it’s going as engrossing as where it violently gets to. Trying for truthful existential tension rather than cheap thrills, the sub-titled film first gets us interested in a young Everyhomme. Sebastien (George Babluani), a workingman hired to repair a roof, comes across a mystifying chance to make a lot of money and can’t resist the opportunity. He finds an envelope, addressed to his abruptly deceased client, which contains a train ticket, a paid hotel reservation, and nothing else. For the first half-hour, everything is all very cloak and dagger, but things quickly get unromantically Tarantino for Sebastien at his destination, with its bloody, drawn-out, and equally suspenseful enterprise.

The Hole Story (USA, 2005)
Wednesday, June 7 | 3:30 pm | Opera House 2
Thursday, June 8 | 9:30 pm | Opera House 2
Making a thriller isn’t the only way to mess with a filmgoer’s mind. Writer and director Alex Karpovsky semi-fictionally rejiggers the documentary genre not into a mockumentary but into a respectful, if very funny, reminder. Namely, that the factual nature of documentaries is flimsy at best, given that selectivity is required. The Alex that the filmmaker plays here is a documentarian on his slow-motion nervous breakdown, after he arrives in Minnesota to film a TV pilot. But the inexplicable hole that had opened up in a thickly frozen lake, perplexing scientists, has frozen over, so he can’t film the phenomenon. We never learn which details — or interview subjects — are inventions, so we’re constantly questioning our assumptions about what is truth. The implicit suggestion is that “real” documentaries should raise such questions. The Alex of the film is desperate to not return to editing karaoke videos, and we appreciate how external reminders of emptiness can echo inner ones.

Live Free Or Die (USA, 2006)
Wednesday, June 7 | 9 pm | Opera House 2
Thursday, June 8 | 2 pm | Opera House 1
Like the above film and Cherry Arnold’s Cianci documentary Buddy, this is part of the “New England Sidebar” trio. Written and directed by former Seinfeld writers Gregg Kavet and Andy Robin, this droll comedy is testimony to the demands of economical storytelling on TV these days, which puts more sluggish indie film writing to shame. Written originally as a TV series pilot (My Name Is Earl got there first), the script was re-plotted into a narrative comedy feature, and it spins a snappy, don’t-waste-a-scene yarn. John “Rugged” Rudgate (Aaron Stanford) is a hapless Granite State hardened-criminal-wannabe who claims to have killed with his bare hands but is intimidated by every glowering actual tough guy. His thievery skills are on the level of stealing quarters from donation cards, but his even more clueless friend Lagrand (Paul Schneider) idolizes him. The mayhem they commit (breaking into a lumber store) is dwarfed by their unearned criminal credit (murder).