SCREENING ROOM

Pedophilia, racism, injustice and ethnic strife are among the issues explored in 16 films.

By Robert Abele, Special to The Times

The International Documentary Assn.'s DocuWeek returns to the ArcLight on Friday, and the selection of films this year — 12 features and four shorts — is especially strong (if mostly chilling) in the stories they tell and the issues they lay open, from the struggle to get a fair price for poverty-stricken coffee growers ("Black Gold") to the efforts of fundamentalist Christians to mold young evangelists ("Jesus Camp").

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A handful of the films focuses on crimes of the past that have regrettably metastasized into personal hells of two decades or more for the films' troubled subjects. Simmering outrage is the primary emotion, for example, in "Deliver Us From Evil" and "The Trials of Darryl Hunt."

"Deliver Us," which recently won the top nonfiction prize at the Los Angeles Film Festival, is director-producer Amy Berg's hushed yet patently disturbing recounting of one pedophile Catholic priest's unchecked reign of decades in a group of parishes in Central California. If the narrative of blind-eye church power failing to protect scads of children is unsettling enough, the sight of said molester Oliver O'Grady now living quietly in Ireland (after a stint in a U.S. prison) and casually reflecting on his past is almost too bizarre for words: like being privy to a child-devouring monster out of Grimm in a kind of post-feast state of contentment.

His victims, however, are nowhere near such resolution.

"Darryl Hunt," screening for the first time in L.A., straightforwardly chronicles the ugly nexus of race prejudice, police negligence and institutional arrogance that kept an innocent black North Carolina man in jail for 19 years for the rape and murder of a white woman. In many tragic ways it's not a new story, but directors Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg had followed Hunt's case for so long that instead of being a collection of talking heads looking back, the film achieves a rare chronological, you-are-there intimacy that makes Hunt's seemingly insurmountable fight for freedom that much more intense.

But perhaps the most haunting and sadly relevant of this subset of docs exploring festering psychic wounds is the extraordinary "Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story," from Chris Sheridan and Patty Kim. The story it tells is a shattering mystery of violation and loss, if only because by the end, certain answers only lead to more punishing questions.

It starts in spine-tingling detective saga fashion with the disappearance of a 13-year-old Japanese girl in 1977 but suddenly turns into an espionage tale when it's determined that the choir-singing, beach-loving Megumi was one of multiple kidnappings at the hands of North Korean spies. And when the abductees' loved ones — including Megumi's resolute, loving parents, who became national celebrities — begin to protest their country's efforts to normalize relations with Kim Jong Il, a true-crime tale of heartbreak adopts a searing political dimension, ultimately becoming a timeless exploration of the incompatibilities of personal anguish and diplomatic reality. Then there's the question of how a tragedy such as this alters and reshapes the bonds of familial love. All this is rendered with not only narrative mastery but also an exquisitely photographic and aural sense of humanity and place, of memory and the present, with lingering interstitial shots of Japan's natural beauty and its modern metropolises that play as if Ozu had directed a sobering "Frontline" report.

Perhaps it's no wonder the ghostly ache of "Abduction" — the filmmakers' poetic sense of how the missing can dominate our lives in a way they might not have had they never vanished — captured the eye of one of modern cinema's most resonant chroniclers of souls in transition: Jane Campion, who joined the project as an executive producer.

More of the moment in its topical sphere — but with no less a sense of history — is the mesmerizing Sundance winner "Iraq in Fragments," which is James Longley's entrancing, agenda-less triptych of Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish figures in the war-torn country. With nary an American soldier in his camera's sights, Longley bobs and weaves among Iraq's conflicted citizenry — giving his subjects their own narrative voice-over — and provides an indelible picture of how dreams and reality are hard to reconcile in a chaos of religious and ethnic strife.

On the lighter side, there's the vicarious nostalgic pop of "Toots," Kristi Jacobson's affectionate and vivid portrait of her brandy-swilling, mob-friendly, sports-obsessed, celeb-attracting saloonkeeper grandfather, Toots Shor, who ran New York's premiere gawk-swig-and-backslap nightspot in the '40s and '50s.

After the admittedly sobering quality of many of DocuWeek's films, a movie where the biggest calamity is a 20-year snub from Joe DiMaggio after an ill-timed crack about his bombshell actress wife may be the kind of zingy shot a discerning doc-lover needs. Drink responsibly.

DocuWeek

Where: ArcLight, 6360 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood

When: Friday through Aug. 24. All films in the festival will receive multiple screenings.

Info: (213) 534-3600,