Report from Full Frame Fest: The Staircase

"How Much Reality Can You Handle?"

That's the theme of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival, which is being held this year until April 10 in Durham, NC. This isn't a festival I'd jet off to under ordinary circumstance, but with family in the area, it not only means a free place to crash, but also a wonderful little film festival of manageable size, usually chock full of little golden nuggets of "real life." Last year's festival featured an evening with Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock as impromptu usher handing out McDonald's = Obesity buttons before a screening of Supersize Me. This year's fest doesn't seem to have a film of this scale featured, but there's a ton of good stuff here, all of which will be covered at Mixed Reviews over the next week or so.

Many of the featured films are showing on Sundance Channel also this month, so watch for them.

One of the most appallingly fascinating films being shown here, which is also running as a series on Sundance, is The Staircase. This film details "The Other Peterson Murder Case." If you're not in the Durham area, you probably didn't hear much about this. My own local newspaper, the Bergen Record, tucked away a little information about this case while it was going on under "News Briefs", but it didn't receive nearly the coverage of the infamous Scott Peterson case in California. I guess the alleged murder of a woman in her 40's who isn't pregnant, especially one with a thriving career of her own and therefore hardly a damsel in distress, isn't as compelling as a pretty young pregnant victim.

What's interesting about this film is that while most people in the Durham area seem to believe that Michael Peterson murdered his wife, this film seems somewhat tilted in the other direction. Peterson certainly comes across as a creepy piece of work despite the leanings of the film's directors. A side issue in this particular case is the fact that Peterson was having sexual encounters with other men, which his wife, Kathleen, may have discovered, leading to an argument and Kathleen's death. And just as chilling as watching Peterson in a testimony rehearsal sounding positively Clintonesque as he parses the moral difference between "sexual relationships" and "sexual contacts" is the little smirk that appears on the prosecutor's face as he speaks to the camera about the wrench that "the gay thing" will throw into the defense's case.

I'm not ordinarily one for true crime stories. Having lived through the John List case when I was in my teens in Westfield, New Jersey, and seeing myself on the evening news weeping at the gravesite of a friend murdered by her own father, I'm always aware that the people surrounding such families are real people as well with their own issues to deal with in the aftermath of such cases. But the way this film is constructed, peeling aside the mysteries of an affluent famiy layer by layer, aptly demonstrates the festival's theme -- that real life is usually far more compelling than fictional scripts.

UPDATE AND IRRESPONSIBLE SPECULATION: Mentioned in the film is the fact that Michael Peterson particularly had a fondness for "military-related gay web sites." I wonder if I was the only one wondering if there was a connection with Gannonguckert, who seems to be pretty much ubiquitous in public discourse these days.