By Peter Keough

The future for documentaries looks troubling, but the IFFBoston perseveres.

The Independent Film Festival of Boston. At the Brattle, Somerville, and Coolidge Corner Theatres through April 30

Judging from the rich selection at recent local cinema events such as Wicked Queer 41, the Salem Film Fest, The National Center for Jewish Film’s Annual Festival, and now the IFFBoston, one might wonder if the ongoing golden age of documentary filmmaking will ever end. But such optimism could be unfounded, or so warns an article that appeared last month in The Guardian, which claims, “the state of a documentary market that has seen buyer interest and dollars shrink, particularly for politically sensitive or social impact films.” As Nancy Campbell, the IFFBoston Program Director, comments, “In my mind documentary is often long form journalism. So it seems obvious that when the press is under attack, by extension, so is documentary filmmaking.”

A scene from Khary Saeed Jones’s Night Fight.

Meanwhile, this year’s program features another outstanding nonfiction lineup. It includes such formally inventive and thematically challenging films as local director Khary Saeed Jones’s debut feature Night Fight (screens April 28 at 7:30 p.m. at the Brattle Theatre followed by a Q & A with Jones and others). Seven years ago Jones had visited a rural town in Canada and was stalked by an unknown vigilante who followed him through the area’s lonely back roads. (This shocking presence of racist groups like the KKK in parts of Canada is further confirmed when Jones visits a local museum dedicated to a Black man prominent in the community who had been murdered).

Jones escaped with a fright, but the terror and trauma have endured and to cope with it he travels back to the town. He drives through the places and streets where he was terrorized. Everything seems different, but also threateningly the same. His investigation is largely subjective, shown in an oblique, impressionistic, poetic style resembling a nightmare version of RaMell Ross’s Hale County This Morning, This Evening (2017). He shares his experience with his son in a version of “The Talk” and also listens to the insights of experts on racist violence and intimidation. In the end, he and his son collaborate on an arrestingly beautiful, abstract allegory that shows that art is one of the best ways to fight back against fear and injustice.

A scene from David Osit’s Predators.

David Osit’s Predators (screens April 24 at 8:45 p.m. at the Somerville Theatre) also approaches past trauma from an oblique angle. As a college undergraduate, Osit had become fascinated by Dateline NBC’s candid-camera investigative series To Catch a Predator (2004-7) in which a would-be pedophile is lured into a rendezvous with a supposedly underage contact played by an actor. Once the target has incriminated himself (and they all seemed to be men) the show’s host, Chris Hansen, would pop in and give him the bad news. What most intrigued Osit about the program was Hansen’s lead question to all those who were busted: Help me understand why you do this? A question that never seems to get answered.

Instead, Predators inexorably circles the crucial issues the show raises. Like, what purpose does it serve? What are the ethics of entrapping and exposing alleged perpetrators, ruining their lives in an extrajudicial condemnation, in order to entertain audiences? What about the trauma suffered by the actors hired as lures and who years later are still coping with their experience? Such as what happened to a young man who couldn’t shake off his feelings of guilt and complicity after a target ended up killing himself on air. That tragic outcome sparked such a scandal that the show was eventually canceled — though not before the episode itself was broadcast to record-breaking ratings.

Nor has the program’s popularity diminished in reruns. Its formula is being imitated with appalling crassness on YouTube, where Hansen himself has reestablished his network popularity as a smug vigilante. Osit at last lands a chance to interview Hansen — during which the filmmaker reveals why he is so interested in the show. Hansen’s air of self-righteousness seems unshakeable. Only when Osit repeats the program’s duplicitous, signature reassurance, “You are free to go,” does a flicker of self-awareness appear to trouble the man’s complacency.

A scene from Elizabeth Lo’s Mistress Dispeller.

Unlike the punitive and moralistic approach of To Catch a Predator, and despite the film’s title, the Chinese agency in Elizabeth Lo’s fascinating Mistress Dispeller proves remarkably compassionate and even-handed (screens April 24 at 6:15 p.m. at the Somerville Theatre).

At first, the middle-aged, bourgeois married couple who are the subjects do not come off well. In the opening scenes, the wife gets a fetching new hairdo at the beauty salon. At dinner her husband slurps noodles and ignores the new look. When she points out his oversight, he mumbles an excuse and heads out the door without explanation. Apparently this isn’t the first time he’s left home mysteriously; her nagging suspicions of infidelity are confirmed when the wife intercepts an incriminating text message. Conferring with her brother, she arranges to put Wang Zhenxi, an established, professional “mistress dispeller,” on the case.

What follows is a version of reality television. Wang uses deception and manipulation to ingratiate herself into the confidence not only of the husband but of the mistress as well. But, rather than attempting to bring the pair to justice, she does her best to find a solution that is in the best interest of all. All the parties served by Wang’s energetic manipulations prove sympathetic and have their reasons – even the other woman, who turns out not to be a gold-digger, as one might expect, but a lonely soul who genuinely loves the husband. She regards him as a kind of father figure. Though Wang’s means appear to be devious, even creepy, her intentions are benevolent. The only time Mistress Dispeller sets off alarm bells of paranoia is in a scene when a car’s GPS warns the driver to slow down because cameras are watching. This is China, after all.

A scene from Mary Jane Doherty’s Cosmic Coda.

Veteran local filmmaker Mary Jane Doherty takes on not just the limits of the universe in her Cosmic Coda (screens April 26 at 12 p.m. at the Somerville Theatre followed by a Q & A with Doherty, production assistant Eliza Gagnon, and two of the subjects), but also ventures to the extreme limits of a filmmaker’s dedication to getting a story right.

In 1985, as a student at MIT in the Film and Video department headed by filmmaking legend Ricky Leacock, she boldly took on for her thesis film a project pursued by another enclave in the school — astrophysics. There grad students headed by Rainer “Rai” Weiss were trying to construct an antenna to detect gravitational waves, and so prove Einstein’s theory about the nature of that elusive force.

At first their earnest, laid back efforts don’t seem very promising. They work in a cramped, grimy space filled with DIY-looking gizmos and wires that look like props from a ’50s sci-fi movie. Then a rehabbing of the lab forces them to drop the project and put the untested device in storage. That is where Gravity, Doherty’s movie, ends up as well.

But, three decades later, things have changed. In 2015 Weiss led a team that, employing a four kilometer long version of their desktop prototype, discovered gravity waves. In 2017 he and his team won the Nobel Prize for their efforts. A protégé of Weiss is following up his research — taking it to the quantum level with a new technology called “squeezing.” At this point most viewers will have long since lost all comprehension of the concepts involved (“I share this information,” comments Doherty in the witty voice-over narration, “in case anyone out there understands what I’m talking about”) and the terminology (we are told that, in this branch of scientific research alone, there are 410 acronyms). But it doesn’t matter. Doherty captures the dedication, enthusiasm, frustrations, and triumphs of this esoteric band while affirming the persistence and genius of her medium.

Among the other documentaries one should be sure to catch at the IFFBoston are Brandt Johnson’s Rebel with a Clause (screens April 28 at 5 p.m. at the Brattle Theatre followed by a Q & A with the director and subject Ellen Jovin), in which a grammar nerd takes her obsession to all 50 states to engage with strangers. This whimsical road movie seeks to answer the question whether a genial, good-humored approach to a neutral (seemingly — watch out for a segment on pronouns!) topic can bridge the political gap (short answer: probably not, but it’s fun watching anyway).

And then there’s François Nemeta’s Michel Gondry: Do It Yourself (screens April 25 at 8 p.m. at Brattle Theatre), an intimate portrait of an artist who combines the sensibilities of Wes Anderson and Jan Švankmajer with a nod to Busby Berkeley, and whose career may have peaked with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and may have tanked with The Green Hornet (2011). Yet his wacky, surreal, bricolage-style approach to making movies endures.

But really, try to see all these documentaries — because, like so many other good things we’ve taken for granted, who knows how long such opportunities will last?

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).