Getting the Facts Straight

But too many screen documentaries adopt the tone of a DVD extra and either settle for a smattering of ageing creatives reminiscing vaguely about the making of a particular picture or allow some exhibitionist academics to theorise preeningly in self-aggrandising media studies jargon. The worst crime, however, is to produce a cine-documentary that says more about the director than their subject and that, sadly, is exactly what Emmanuel Laurent has managed to do with Two in the Wave.

The riveting relationship between François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard is chronicled with perfunctory completiveness in this hugely disappointing profile, which lacks any of the visual energy and innovation that enabled these very different Young Turks to launch the nouvelle vague in the late 1950s. Co-scripted by Antoine de Baecque (who has written biographies of both auteurs), the commentary struggles to find a consistency of tone, as it veers between academic consideration to gossipy anecdote. Moreover, it seems more intent on perfecting close-ups of Isild Le Besco (who acts as an on-screen page turner for the copious amounts of printed and photographic material on which Laurent relies) than identifying the personal traits and artistic ambitions that caused these once-inseparable friends to become implacable adversaries.

The background information is presented efficiently enough, as it explains how a Swiss-raised bourgeois and a troubled delinquent each found salvation in the offices of André Bazin's journal, Cahiers du Cinéma, and the screening rooms of Henri Langlois's Cinemathèque Française. However, Laurent breezes through the critical phase that did so much to shape the pair and dwells more on their swaggering styles than the import of Truffaut's essay on the Tradition of Quality and their advocacy of la politique des auteurs. Indeed, he similarly seems more concerned about the making and reception of Les 400 Coups (1959) and A Bout de souffle (1960) than their filmic audacity and ingenuity.

Laurent then focuses on issues like Godard's marriage to Anna Karina, the supposed feud over custody of actor Jean-Pierre Léaud (whom Truffaut had discovered, but Godard used more contentiously) and their roles in both the restoration of Langlois to his Cinemathèque post and the cancellation of the Cannes Film Festival in the spring of 1968. Yet, while these are all crucial to the deterioration of Truffaut and Godard's friendship, it prevents Laurent from discussing their impact on French and then international cinema. Moreover, he seems little concerned by their diverging development as film-makers and men, and makes no attempt to assess how such contemporaries and onetime Cahiers colleagues as Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette perceived their growing antipathy and respective drifts towards classicism and agit-prop.

The film extracts that Laurent selects are solid enough and he has unearthed some splendid archive and interview footage - with Godard's encounter with Fritz Lang being particularly compelling. Yet he fails to identify Jean Rouch in a clip in which he recalls how a faulty equipment caused him accidentally to jump cut a passage in Moi un noir (1958) and this cavalier attitude to facts and analysis results in a preponderance of sweeping statements and specious assumptions. Moreover, Laurent opts to ignore the fact that Godard repented some of his more stinging denunciations after Truffaut's early death in 1984. Thus, while few cinéastes will be able to resist the magnificent monochrome newsreel, most will regret that more care and imagination were not invested in the documentary's construction and accompanying text.

If Two in the Wave belongs to the traditional form of analytical documentary, Mark Henderson and Kate Horne's My Kidnapper typifies the kind of cathartic confessional testament that has become increasingly common in contemporary actuality. Highly personal and often disconcerting for outsiders, these first-hand accounts of mostly traumatic experiences can often be vainglorious affairs. However, they can also be frustratingly obfuscatory, as the subject is simply too close to the topic under discussion to offer any objective insights.

Following Henderson back to the Sierra Nevada mountains in Colombia, where he was abducted with seven other tourists by the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (or National Liberation Army), My Kidnapper falls into the latter category. Shot with handheld cameras in available light, the film viscerally conveys the unimaginable anxiety that Henderson, Reinihilt Weigel, Erez Eltawil and Ido Guy felt on returning to the ancient city of Ciudad Perdida, where they were snatched in the early hours of 11 September 2003. But, as a record of their ordeal and Henderson and Weigel's subsequent e-mail correspondence with captors Antonio and Camila, it's chaotically impressionistic and it says much that Horne produced a more coherent version of events last November in a Daily Telegraph article about the making of the film.

A television producer from Lincoln, the 31 year-old Henderson had travelled to Colombia to visit a cousin and clear his head after ending a long-term relationship. However, just days into the expedition, he found himself being held hostage by Marxist guerillas demanding an inquiry into human rights abuses in a region that was disputed by right-wing paramilitaries and drug barons, as well as the ELN and its larger rival, FARC.

Following the audacious escape of teenage Briton Matthew Scott, Hendeson was marched for nine days through hostile terrain with a Spaniard, 31 year-old German physiotherapist Reini Weigel and four Israelis, including software engineer Ido Guy and student Erez Eltawil. Perhaps conditioned by their domestic experiences, the two twentysomethings refused to co-operate with their guards and eventually attempted a flight of their own. But Henderson and Weigel were more sympathetic to the ELN cause and they grew close to Antonio and Camila after they arrived at the camp, with Henderson and Antonio discovering a shared taste in music and films.

However, the captives' plight had begun to slip off the international news agenda and it took the mediation of Monseñor Hector Fabio Henao to persuade Colombian president Alvaro Uribe to suspend military incursions into the Sierra and allow the human rights agency Defensoría del Pueblo to begin an investigation that prompted the release of the hostages, after 101 days, on 22 December.

Henderson returned to Britain and struggled for several months with post-traumatic stress disorder. But, just as he was beginning to rebuild his life, he received an e-mail from Antonio informing him that he had fled Colombia and was now studying in a neighbouring country. Reini Weigel received similar messages from Camila and while she and Henderson declined an invitation to attend the couple's wedding, they decided they had to take the opportunity to retrace their steps in the hope of finally achieving some sort of closure.

Proceeding under heavy armed guard, the quartet landed by helicopter near Ciudad Perdida and spent the night in the hut from which they had been abducted six years earlier. The strain on all four is readily evident. But Weigel clearly suffers the most, as not only had she been plagued by back problems since her release, but she had also been ordered just weeks before by a German court to pay €18,000 towards the cost of her repatriation.

Weigel also seems most affected by the resurfacing of the old tensions between the Europeans and the Israelis. But Henderson is evidently shaken by the excursion to the village of Ciénaga, which is home to 3000 of the country's six million displaced persons. He is initially taken aback by recognising one of the old women who had been forced to feed them by the ELN gunmen. But it's the realisation that nothing had changed for these victims of a pitiless conflict that hits home hardest, as it suddenly becomes apparent that his torment has essentially counted for nothing.

The documentary ends with Henderson and Weigel taking their leave of Eltawil and Guy to visit Antonio and Camila in hiding. The renegades only consent to be photographed in deep shadow, thus adding a touch of noirish mystery to the encounter. But the reunion sheds little fresh light on the foursome's unconventional relationship and compounds the impression that what has undoubtedly been a necessary odyssey for the protagonists too often leaves the viewer feeling like an intruder upon private grief.

Juxtaposing Guillermo Galdos and Tom Swindell's atmospheric jungle vistas with prying close-ups of the returnees as they deal with their raging emotions, the film brilliantly conveys the moral complexities of both the civil war and the tactic of hostage taking. But the chronology is confused and the ideological issues underlying the curious mix of camaraderie and antipathy between the backpackers are largely left unresolved. Thus, this never says as much about empathy and forgiveness as it hopes. Nevertheless, there is something indelibly poignant about Henderson's harrowing epiphany in Ciénaga and the more consoling appreciation of Antonio's awkwardly macho attempt at an apology.

Equally well-meaning, but similarly flawed in its execution, Mohamed al-Daradji's Son of Babylon is an Iraqi road movie that owes much to the humanist tradition of Iranian film-making. Contrasting the mythical glories of antiquity with the shocking realities of a nation decimated by four decades of tyranny, this seeks to place the blame for Iraq's woes firmly on the shoulders on Saddam Hussein. But, in striving to encourage reconciliation by suggesting that even eager cohorts acted more out of fear than conviction, Al-Daradji risks compromising the authenticity of a picture that already resorts frequently to sentimentality when the enormity of the truth appears too much to bear.

Three weeks after Saddam's fall in April 2003, Shezhad Hussein learns that Kurdish prisoners have been released from captivity in Nasiriyah and she desperately hopes that the son she has not seen since his arrest following the First Gulf War will be among them. Accompanied by 12 year-old grandson Yasser Taleeb (who has never seen his father), she hitches a lift with truck driver Salih Abdul Rahman Farhad, who is irritated by Taleeb brandishing his father's military jacket and his incessant tooting on an old flute. However, despite a breakdown and the occasional rant, Farhad gets his passengers to Baghdad, where Taleeb befriends cigarette seller Muhammed Hussein Jbara after his grandmother dispatches him to find out where they are supposed to catch the bus south.

Eventually, the pair reach the end of their 600-mile journey. But the prison is empty and the records of who survived incarceration are either chaotic or non-existent. Hussein is told about the mass graves that are being discovered across the country, but it's only after the bus back to the capital breaks down that she agrees to allow kindly middle-aged Bashir al-Majid to help her search for his missing son.

Having consulted Asmaeel Al-Matri at a mosque that had given refuge to political prisoners, the trio reach a burial ground where Hussein sympathises with grieving widow Kefaya Dakhel Kareem. However, their anguish proves too much for Al-Majid, who confesses that he was a Revolutionary Guardsman actively participated in the Anfal against the Kurds. Hussein forgives him, but Taleeb drives him away and ushers his grandmother on to a bus home. Shortly into the journey, he spots a signpost to the remains of the Hanging Gardens. But when he tries to rouse Hussein, he realises she has passed away.

Evocatively photographed in barren deserts and decimated cityscapes by the director and Duraid Munajim, this is a movingly poetic and intensely metaphorical lament for a country and its suffering people. Yet Al-Daradji struggles to make the case that Arabs endured as much as the Kurds and other persecuted minorities and his plea for unity through redemption and forgiveness sometimes seems a little naive.

The excellent non-professional cast reflect his earnestness to the extent that, while the irrepressible Taleeb slips in some much-needed mischievousness, he is also made to embody a slightly specious connection between the Babylonian past and the post-Ba'thist future. But, even if the film's socio-political insights are a touch simplistic, it's still infinitely preferable to see the Iraqi perspective being expressed by indigenous artists rather than being patronisingly imposed by Hollywood.