Whilst I am on a roll posting about other practitioners, I thought I would mention a documentary that I watched last week called "True Stories: Billy The Kid".
It is about a 15 year old boy from Maine in the US who has behavioral difficulties. The documentary was unlike anything I have seen before. Billy (the kid) basically went about his day to day life whilst a crew followed him using what seemed to be mini-dv cameras (or at least it had that feel). It almost felt that you were watching raw unedited footage, which made the documentary seem very true.
Whilst watching you are constantly looking at Billy frowning, and in a way you feel bad for doing it as you are doing what everyone else in the film is doing, thinking he is just some weird kid. A major story in the film was when Billy meets a blind girl who works in a local diner. They get on, well and she becomes his girlfriend. Later, she ends the relationship which sends Billy off the rails. Apparently, he was threatening to kill himself over it. Whilst watching the film, you are always waiting for something to happen that will just flip Billy out. Perhaps this is because of the intense look that he constantly has on his face (maybe the reason why the blind girl got on so well with him, as she didn't judge him on the way he looked).
All in all I would definitely recommend watching this film. The very rough style of it really compliments the intensity of Billy, and makes you feel like the film is really really true to life. However, strangely, to watch it you would think it was made by a couple of students on a tiny budget, but when you watch the extensive credits at the end you see that it obviously had a lot of funding and a lot of people working on the project, which makes me think that this "raw footage/unedited" look that they were going for was artificial, which undermines the very premise of choosing this style for the film in the first place.
You can watch it online here.
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