Drakmar airs on HBO Family this summer.

I met local filmmakers Destin Daniel Cretton and Lowell Frank a number of years ago when I was looking for films to screen at a student film festival I run called Film School Confidential. I was impressed by a short film they had made called Longbranch. The film played out like an elaborate Rube Goldberg device in which every action by every character had a ripple effect through the entire film. The construction of the film reflected their point of view, which was that everything we do in life--whether we realize it or not--touches someone else and has a tangible effect on the world around us. The film revealed a fine sense of craft and a meticulous attention to detail.

Those qualities are evident in all their work. I have since shown two more of their short films: Bartholomew's Song and Deacon's Mondays. Again, both films exhibited a complex sense of construction in which the moving parts of the stories are intricately intertwined. Cretton and Frank also made a feature called Drakmar: A Vassal's Journey. I thought the film was a marvelous and surprising documentary work but because of its length, I had no place to showcase it.

Then last year, I invited the two filmmakers to the San Diego Film Critics Society Awards banquet. The critics group is one of the supporters of Film School Confidential and we try to invite young filmmakers from the festival each year so that hopefully they can meet up with the awards winners that we have attending the banquet. So last year, Bennett Miller received an award for his film Capote, and Cretton and Frank had the opportunity to speak with him. They told him about their film, gave him a copy and a short time later he let them know that he liked the film and would help hook them up with HBO.

Miller has said of the film, "I'm always astonished when I come across a film that is this honest and disarming." And he's right.

Drakmar actually began as a short documentary in the fall of 2004. Both Cretton and Frank were grad students in the film department at SDSU and their short focused on a San Diego based medieval re-enactment group known as The Kingdom of Terre Nueve. While making the film they met Colin Taylor, a bright but a bit nerdy fourteen-year-old. As they got to know Colin, they realized they had richer material than they had originally thought and decided to expand the short into a feature focusing on the young boy. The film would end up costing the filmmakers a whooping $200.

The feature documentary begins by focusing on Colin and his alter ego in the Kingdom of Terre Nueve, Drakmar. Colin comes across as a bright kid who lacks the kind of social skills to excel in high school. So while school proves a challenge (of the wrong kind), Colin devotes his energy to the medieval world of Terre Nueve where he is called upon to be the page of Sir Cledwyn. The filmmakers take great care to reveal this world and to show the obsessive attention to detail displayed by its members. Initially, this is what viewers think the film will be about.

But that's when the filmmakers decide to give Drakmar a surprising turn. They reveal that Colin's biological father left when Colin was very young and Colin harbors considerable resentment towards him for that. But Colin's older brother expresses an interest in re-connecting with his dad. And that's when the filmmakers step out from behind the camera and actually take an active part in shaping the story they are telling. They decide to help track down the missing dad and arrange a meeting. That's an astonishing and bold move to make and it pays off richly. That's also what makes the film feel so fresh: it starts out as one thing and gracefully morphs into a portrait of family in which the filmmakers take a surprisingly active role. Both filmmakers cite director Steve James (Stevie, Hoop Dreams) as an influence, and James is also one who breaks the traditional role of documentary filmmaker by acknowledging a more subjective perspective on his subjects.

Drakmar has a wonderful sense of detail and pacing. The filmmakers have the habit of holding on a shot after a person has finished making a statement or comment. Most filmmakers would be concerned about maintaining a tighter pace and would have cut the shot much shorter. But in the contemplative pauses that the filmmakers allow for in Drakmar, we get something extra, a brief moment of reflection that punctuates the scene in a highly satisfying manner.

Drakmar: A Vassal's Journey debuts on HBO Family on Fathers Day June 17 and then repeats during the next two months. It's well-worth checking out and I'm sure we'll be hearing more from this talented pair of filmmakers.

You can listen to Destin Daniel Cretton, Lowell Frank and Colin Taylor on These Days.

Visit the filmmakers' website Flagpop.

Known by her nickname, The Little Sparrow, chanteuse Edith Piaf dazzled audiences around the globe with a passionate, powerful voice that boomed forth from a tiny, frail body. In the film La Vie en Rose, French filmmaker Olivier Dahan tries to create a portrait of the singer that captures the drama inherent in both her songs and her life.

Young Edith performs in La Vie en Rose (Picturehouse)

Dahan serves up a fractured narrative that jumps around in time to deliver what he calls an impressionistic "emotional journey." The film begins near the end of Piafs live as the singer collapses during a New York performance. Then we jump back in time to see Edith's troubled childhood. Her mother aspired to a singing career but never got much past alcohol and singing on street corners. Her father was a circus contortionist who took little Edith away from her mother only to leave her with her grandmother who ran a brothel. There she's befriended by a prostitute named Titine (Emmauelle Seigner is a brief and rather hysterical performance). But Edith proved sickly and the film shows her going through a period when she couldn't see (possibly severe conjunctivitis). But a prayer and a pilgrimmage to St. Therese "miraculously" restores her sight.

If we arrange all the pieces of the film in chronological order, Edith (played as a adult by Marion Cotillard) eventually leaves the brothel, travels with her father for a bit and then heads off on her own. She is befriended by Momone (Sylvia Tetsud), another street urchin. Edith sings anywhere she can and makes enough money to barely get by. Then she's discovered by Louis Leplee (Gerard Depardieu), a club owner who senses her raw talent. From there she finds her way to fame but its a troubled path. Recovery from a car crash apparently leads to a morphine addiction; she has a pair of failed marriages; a heated affair with a boxer; and a diva's disposition. But the one constant is her burning desire to sing.

Dahan comes from a music video background (mostly doing videos for the band the Cranberries) so it's not surprising that the two most powerful moments in the film are musical ones. When young Edith (played by Pauline Burlet) sings for the first time and belts out the French national anthem, it's a show stopper. As is a scene in which a sickly Edith at the end of her career performs what would be a signature song, Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien (which roughly translates as no regrets or I regret nothing). In these two scenes, we get a sense of Edith's artistic passion and why she achieved such renown.

Dahan states in the press materials that he wanted to make a film about "what drives an artist" and he chose "someone who places no barrier between her life and her art." This leads Dahan to another effective and more stylishly flamboyant scene. As Edith reels from a personal tragedy, she runs frantically through her apartment. But as she races down hallways and through doors, she ultimately ends up walking out onto a stage and singing her heart out. The scene offers a surreal visualization of how Edith pulled from her own life when performing. But thats really the closest Dahan ever gets to providing us with any insights into what drives this particular artist.

Piaf wrote some of her own songs but we never get a sense of that from the film. The film focuses too much on the diva side of her persona, on the extremes of her life. This may make for grand melodramatic scenes but it rarely lets us in close so that we gleam some insights or even that we get to feel like we come to know who she is as a person. Dahan sweeps audiences up in big waves of emotion. Maybe the film would have been more satisfying if Dahan had stayed with what he knows best--music videos. Perhaps he could have constructed the whole film in a more surreal, impressionistic manner and constructed a series of music videos linking each song to something in Piaf's life. But as the film stands, it straddles two film styles: a standard biopic and a more freeflowing musical interpretation of a life.

Sylvia Tetsud and Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose (Picturehouse)

In terms of relationships, Dahan keeps Edith's friendship with Momone as a constant running in the background but we know nothing of how they met or why they cling so firmly to each other. The one male romance he focuses on involving fighter Marcel Cerdan (played by French rock star Jean-Pierre Martins)has a dreamy quality that avoids the supposedly tumultuous nature of the real affair.

But Dahan doesn't really delve into Piaf's artistry and creativity beyond the fact of her actual singing. By that I mean, he shows her performing, provides a brief scene of her training and then little else about her craft. Why can't we see her working to write her own songs? That would seem to fit perfectly into Dahan's vision of her as an artist who draws on her own life. One major annoyance in the film is that with the exception of the final song, Dahan refuses to subtitle any of the lyrics. Maybe he didn't want to distract us with reading as Edith is singing but how can we fully appreciate how her life and art intertwined if we don't know the specifics of what she's singing about. Sure we can understand the emotional thrust of the song but not the details. Piaf also had an eye for talent; she discovered young talent like Yves Montand, but that's not evident in the film either.

Dahan depicts her as a high strung performer who seems disconnected from the craft of creating her art. The only interest she seems to have is in making demands on everyone to provide for her every whim. What we end up with is a film that plays on a familiar formula (albeit one more often employed for rock stars) of a person overcoming hard knocks, finding fame, getting addicted to drugs, and dying too young. The formula was used most notably for Lady Sings the Blues and The Rose (films that depicted Billie Holiday and a Janis Joplin-like singer respectively).

As for Marion Cotillards performance, it's as erratic as the film. There are definitely moments of passion yet there are other times when she comes across as a clownish caricature of Piaf. In these moments of exaggerated pantomime, I felt like I should have been watching a silent film. Cotillard (who you may not recognize as the woman from A Good Year) does manage to look quite a bit like Piaf. Sylvia Tetsud (who was absolutely riveting in another true life drama, Murderous Maids) is intense as Momone while Gerard Depardieu and Pascal Gregory are kept to the periphery as men who proved helpful and supportive of Edith.

La Vie en Rose (rated PG-13 for substance abuse, sexual content, brief nudity, language and thematic elements) provides a tantalizing introduction to the tiny dynamo that was Edith Piaf but it's far from being a definitive or enlightening portrait of the famous singer.

Companion viewing: French Cancan (in which the real Piaf has a role), Moulin Rouge, Murderous Maids

The new Japanese anime Paprika (Sony)

Paprika opens with a mind-bending sequence. A spotlight turns on as a tiny, toy-like trunk drives out in what looks to be an animated opening logo. But then a circus clown emerges from the car and announces: It's the greatest show time. A full circus suddenly appears and fills the screen. Then we meet a cop, Konakawa (voiced by Akio Ohtsuka), who finds himself part of the magic act. He slips out of the real world into a surreal realm in which his surroundings continually morph. He finds himself in what seems to be a series of movie clips first Tarzan, then a Hitchcock thriller, then Roman Holiday and finally he wakes up. We realize it's all been a dream with a mysterious woman named Paprika overseeing his journey.

The film places us sometime in the future. A device called the DC Mini has made it possible for therapists to go inside their patient's dreams and record them. Police detective Konakawa is one such patient. He's been having this same disturbing dream over and over again. The bright, red-headed Paprika (Megumi Hayashibara) is the DC Mini alter ego of straitlaced psychiatrist Dr. Atsuko Chiba (also voiced by Hayashibara). The DC Mini is still in trial mode so when one of the prototypes is stolen, it causes major concern. That concern proves justified when the thief ends up invading the dreams of others and creating havoc on an epic scale. The only recourse is for Atsuko and Paprika to use the remaining DC Mini to enter the dream realm to find the crook. But in this dream world, Paprika starts developing a mind of her own, and that's only one of many fascinating turns this dazzling anime takes.

Paprika's DC Mini calls to mind devices in such other sci-fi films as Kathryn Bigelow's Strange Days and David Cronenberg's eXistenZ. And as with those films the line between what's real and what isn't gets increasingly blurred until we feel like we've gone through the looking glass with Alice. But for Satoshi Kon, he's less interested in the sci-fi aspect of this device and more concerned with tackling notions of subjective versus objective perspectives. The idea that he suggests is that whatever a person experiences whether it's a dream, a drugged vision or something else feels real to them. Kon has repeatedly returned to this theme in his work yet each time he's come at it from a slightly different angle.

In Perfect Blue, he created a Hitchcockian thriller in which an actress being stalked plays a character that's being stalked, and the line between the real world and the world of her imagination becomes blurred. In Magnetic Rose (a segment he wrote for Katsuhiro Otomos trilogy Memories), the blurring occurs between memory and reality. And in Millennium Actress, memory, time periods, and parts played by an actress all blur as a TV crew tries to document an aging stars life. Then most recently his series Paranoia Agent (if David Lynch had made an anime it would be this) employed a different style for each episode in order to reflect the different subjective perspective of each character focused on. Once again, he emphasized the subjective nature of experience and used that to create a creepy and compellingly bizarre mystery.

Are we men dreaming we're butterflies or vice versa? Paprika (Sony)

In creating these blurred realities, Kon favors abrupt scenes changes that lack clear establishing shots. This disorients viewers and makes them take a moment to decide where they are. His love of film comes through in his playful use of movie allusions. After all, movies and dreams share similar qualities movies are like waking dreams and we often describe our dreams in movie terms. Paprika says that dreams during early sleep are like arty shorts while deep REM sleep produces something more akin to a blockbuster movie. So at one point her therapy includes sitting in a movie theater with Konakawa analyzing his dream as it's projected on the big screen. He discusses such cinematic concepts as crossing the 180, and he's even dressed in an outfit reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa's favorite on-set garb. There are also jaunty references to other films. Paprika's costumes change from the Monkey King to Tinkerbell to Pinnochio, while everything from Tarzan to Roman Holiday to The Shining gets a passing nod. I saw the film twice, and the second time I found even more references. Kon even makes an inside joke about his own film, Tokyo Godfathers, by having a poster of it up on one of the street signs.

Kon cites George Roy Hill's movie Slaughter House Five (based on Kurt Vonneguts book) as a strong and early influence on him. He has said that he liked the way different places and times would be put together and expressed at the same time for the character. His films frequently play with this notion as well. He also acknowledges the influence of writer Philip K. Dick and the film based on his story, Blade Runner. At the Tokyopop website, Kon expressed approval of a program description of his film as a collision of Hello Kitty and Philip K. Dick. So that makes Paprika both cute and disturbing, in a surprisingly good way.

As with many of Japan's sci-fi anime, Paprika is distrustful of science and meddling with the natural order of things. This distrust comes in part from the fact that Japan knows first hand about the havoc that science can wreak, after all it's the only country to sustain the devastation of two atomic blasts. That fact has colored much of Japan's science fiction whether it's Godzilla (who was created in an atomic blast) or mushroom cloud images that appear in so much anime. In Paprika there's no mushroom cloud but there's massive destruction of a similar scale and it all results from a combination of human ambition and science overstepping the boundaries of whats safe. The film's message is one of caution when dealing with the powerful potential science has to offer.

Kon says that he learned how to direct by drawing mangas (Japanese comics) in which he had to direct the action in the panels that look very much like storyboards for a film. Paprika displays a very different visual style from Perfect Blue (which was noirish, claustrophobic and unsettling) and Millennium Actress (which was very fluid and nostalgic). In Paprika, the experience has a trippier feel, like a psychedelic drug journey during which your mouth keeps dropping open in awe. Kon's film keeps surprising us with its audacious imagery. The end could use a little tightening, but aside from that Kon keeps us riveted to the screen.

While American animation directors tends to revel in their state of the art 3D CGI technology, filmmakers like Kon, Hiyao Miyazaki and Otomo delight in still hand drawing some of the images and then enhancing them with CGI-enhanced camera moves and richly detailed backgrounds. There's something magical about the old school hand drawn style. The difference seems to be that the hand drawn images have more artistry whereas the more realistic CGI/3D animation seems more impressive in its display of technology.

Paprika (rated R for violent and sexual images, and is in Japanese with English subtitles) offers a breathtakingly surreal journey. It's a film that may serve up mass destruction and ponder some nightmarish scenarios, but underneath it has a warm humanity and humor that's utterly endearing. This contrast is apparent from the beginning as Kon follows the nightmarish opening sequence with a delightful montage of Paprika flying over the city, tending to those who have drifted off and taking pleasure in the little things in life.

Companion viewing: Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Paranoia Agent, eXistenZ, Slaughter House Five, Blade Runner