If we had a choice, would we opt to see the world? Or, instead, would we take an opportunity to see ourselves as others see us?

Last week, I got to do a little of both at the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham.

For a hundred years, films have made it possible for viewers to travel almost anywhere and to experience vividly the life stories of other people. Documentary films have done this job well. But it has been a tough road.

The great expense of securing and using high quality equipment and talented and creative artists put a limit on the number of films that could be made. It has been tough to get enough funding – especially when few documentary films are commercial successes.

But the great improvements in video cameras and editing equipment now make it possible for talented filmmakers to shoot and process documentaries on a very low budget.

The result has been an explosion of productions.

For instance, the Full Frame Festival was barraged with more than a thousand entries.

It crowded about 100 films into four days last week, leaving many, many very good films that will have to look for another venue to share their stories.

With one of the selected films, “Last Train Home,” I took a jam-packed, tense train ride from one end of China to the other. I rode with workers returning from a new factory town to their home in rural China.

There, I experienced with them how China’s industrialization has destroyed traditional family life.

Another film, “Kings of Pastry,” took me to France for a brutal competitive event in which an American chef sought, bravely but unsuccessfully, to gain recognition as a French Master Chef.

Every viewer shared the agony of his defeat and was also inspired by his spirited assertion of the value of the entire experience.

“Garbo: The Spy” told the unbelievable story of a “double agent” whose false reports to his German handlers helped “prove” that the main Allied attack was not aimed, at Normandy, but at the beaches near Calais.

What brought me back home to North Carolina was “How to Fold a Flag,” about four soldiers who fought together in Iraq. When they got home, they had to fight their personal battles alone.

Every returning soldier’s challenges to readapt are different.

The film’s stories shout out that our country is not doing enough to ease the way for soldiers coming home.

For instance, one of the subjects, Michael Goss, who was unfairly dismissed from the army, could not get the medical help he needs to deal with the haunting guilt he feels for participating an incident that inadvertently resulted in the death of Iraqi children.

Another returning soldier, Jon Powers, bravely mounted a hopeful campaign for Congress.

He gained wide popular support based on his military service. But in the end, his rivals’ million dollar negative TV ads denied him success.

In North Carolina, Javorn Drummond, returned to rural Cumberland County near Fayetteville to live in a dilapidated mobile home while trying to fund the completion of a college education at Fayetteville State by working in a hog processing plant.

It was hard for all of them. For them the war continues.

Quoting German author Ernst Jünger, the film asserts on its subjects’ behalf, “We were asked to believe that the war was over. We laughed – for we were the war.”

Thanks to Full Frame, I visited China, France, World War II Europe, and Iraq. I saw the inside of the lives of those who lived and fought there.

And through their lenses I saw something of myself, as others may see me.



D.G. Martin is hosting his final season of UNC-TV’s North Carolina Bookwatch, which airs at 5 p.m. Sundays. His blog and prior programs can be viewed at www.unctv.org/ncbookwatch. This Sunday’s (April 18) guest is, is Marianne Gingher, author of “Adventures in Pen Land, ” a “writer’s memoir” in which Gingher describes her life leading to the publication of her first novel, the still popular “Bobby Rex’s Greatest Hit.”