Cinema presents Family Matters, a series of three documentaries

On Oct. 18 and 20, Cornell Cinema presents "The Cruise," a whirlwind documentary tour through New York City featuring zany tour bus guide Timothy "Speed" Levitch. Also showing this weekend (Oct. 17) is "Love and Diane," the first of three documentaries on families. Frank DiMeo/University Photography

The sticky psychological bonds and grueling interactions that occur within a family structure have long been grist for nonfiction filmmakers. This month, Cornell Cinema presents Family Matters, a series of three films, all dealing with families in the worst sort of flux, all made by filmmakers who struggled with their roles as documentarians of family strife and each extraordinary in its honest portrayal of the human experience.

Tickets are $6 general; $5 for students and seniors; and $4 for Cornell graduate students. For more information about these or other October screenings, call 255-3522 or visit http://cinema.cornell.edu.

The series opens with the Ithaca premiere of "Love and Diane" on Friday, Oct. 17, at 7 p.m. in the Willard Straight Hall Theatre. Filmmaker and former Cornell graduate student Jennifer Dworkin will be on hand, along with Diane Hazzard, one of the subjects of this compassionate and uncompromising epic. Dworkin's film follows Diane, a recovering crack addict, as she works to regain her children's trust and complete a job-training course. At the same time, her conflicted 18-year-old daughter, Love Hinson, tries to navigate the social services network in order to be reunited with her newborn son. A portrait of a family struggling to learn from past mistakes, "Love and Diane" is "a continuously absorbing, sometimes revelatory, frequently moving experience; as documentary filmmaking it's not only amazingly intimate but also characterized by an unexpected lyricism," said The Village Voice.

The following week, Steve James will visit with the Ithaca premiere of his film "Stevie." Before James made "Hoop Dreams," he attended film school at Southern Illinois University, where he was the Big Brother to a troubled and abused 11-year-old named Stevie Fielding. This documentary records their reunion over 10 years later and the events that unfolded after Stevie was accused of molesting his 8-year-old cousin.

Finally, Cornell Cinema presents "Capturing the Friedmans," Andrew Jarecki's outstanding documentary about a family's legal struggles and internal conflicts after a father and son are accused of horrific crimes. When Jarecki first met David Friedman, a.k.a. Silly Billy, it was to interview him for a short film about the popular New York City clown. Little did the filmmaker know, however, that David harbored over a decade's worth of resentment and anger tied to the arrests of his father and younger brother for child molestation in 1987. As Jarecki asked more questions and uncovered not only a family drama of Shakespearean proportions but also a hysteria-driven police investigation, he felt compelled to make a film chronicling the events surrounding the arrests.