I missed out on the first film of yesterday's slate, Shotgun Stories by Jeff Nichols, because I wanted to get my first dispatch up before I left the hotel for the day. By the time I made it over to the Virginia Theater and found parking (a feat almost as difficult as finding parking in New York City -- okay, not quite, but it is a bit of a challenge) the screening had started already.

Fortunately, I've seen the film already on a screener, and though I would have liked to have seen it on a big screen, I can tell you that this tale of brothers in rural Arkansas coming to terms with the death of their abusive father is an excellent little indie film, and very deserving of the Independent Spirit Award it won earlier this year. Hanging out outside the theater throughout the day, I kept hearing fest folks talking about this film and how much they loved it, and I'm glad Roger added it to this year's program.

Home movies are the bane of documentary film, and as time progresses there are likely to be more and more biographical projects that are lazily pieced together from their subjects' collection of amateur videos and 8mm films. Further advancements in technology, such as editing capabilities available for personal computers, has even allowed for the low-budget autobiographical doc, which disgustingly saw the light of day and overrated acclaim two years ago with Jonathan Caouettte's Tarnation.

Now there is Taggart Siegel's The Real Dirt on Farmer John, a would-be-interesting showcase of eccentric, organic farmer John Peterson, founder of one of the largest CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) groups in the nation. Using his family's old Super 8s, John constructs his own autobiography masked as a history of the farm on which he grew up, and the footage has an unfortunate precedence in the telling of his story.