PICKING UP THE PIECES: A scene from Iraq in Fragments.

Be it the festival's manageable size, Southern hospitality, or the endemic curiosity of documentary buffs—most likely, a combination of all three—the communal spirit was contagious. There was Sydney Pollack, whose engaging Sketches of Frank Gehry opened the festival, grabbing a sandwich in the hospitality suite rather than racing off to a private dining room, and I later spotted Albert Maysles, whose contribution was a highlight of the Full Frame-produced omnibus Time Piece, wandering through a hotel ballroom with a late-night snack in his hand, then sitting down to converse with a pair of complete strangers.

Maysles was also on hand for the festival's tribute to the legendary cameraman Ricky Leacock, whose filmography runs back to the days of Robert Flaherty. But while his colleagues D.A. Pennebaker and Robert Drew reminisced on stage, "just Ricky" only wanted to talk about the future. "To hell with film!" he proclaimed. "I'm digital now." The massive Mitchell placed on the stage for Leacock's tribute contrasted notably with the pint-sized cameras employed by many of the festival's filmmakers, who have taken self-sufficiency to places the assembled titans of direct cinema never could have dreamed. James Longley, whose poetic Iraq in Fragments snagged the fest's top prize, served as his film's cinematographer, sound recordist and editor, and even wrote the film's score, creating a vividly personal, if sometimes abstracted, portrait of the country's three main regions. Still without a distributor months after its Sundance acclaim, the film is difficult less because of its subject matter than its approach, Longley believes, although a run has been booked for New York's Film Forum in the fall.

More conventional in approach but no less spellbinding, Laura Poitras' My Country, My Country, follows a Shiite doctor in the months before the Iraqi elections, as he declares his candidacy and then wrestles with his party's decision to withdraw from the process. Poitras seemed almost embarrassed to compare her observational style with that of the assembled legends, but the film (scheduled for a summer release) is a sterling example of documentary's ability to humanize a situation that typically flashes over our screens in 30-second chunks.

Among the festival's programs were sidebars devoted to post-Katrina New Orleans (including Robert Mugge's entertaining New Orleans Music in Exile) and a historical overview of films on social class in the United States. But issues of race and class were hardly confined to their designated slots. James Scurlock's Maxed Out addresses how rampant debt and credit-card culture keeps Americans—not to mention their government—in thrall to lenders, while Ricky Stern and Annie Sundberg's The Trials of Darryl Hunt told the riveting story of a black Wake Forest man who was wrongly imprisoned for almost two decades. Mining drama from Hunt's lengthy appeals process (itself no small feat), Trials is a searing indictment of institutional racism which brought the audience to its feet several times over. (Not surprisingly, the film won the festival's audience award.) The triumphant air was marred only slightly by the post-screening panel, at which Hunt got less airtime than retired Justice I. Beverly Lake, a member of North Carolina's Actual Innocence Commission, who essentially downplayed the severity of the injustices committed in Hunt's case and implied that the state was well on its way to ensuring that they'd never be repeated.

In a revealing bit of counter-programming, Lake also turned up as a character in Terry Sanford and the New South, as a pro-segregation gubernatorial candidate in 1960. Sanford, who ran as nominally pro-segregation but promptly integrated the state's bathrooms and public accommodations once he took office, is cast as a lost legend, one who turned the tide of Southern politics but has been largely forgotten outside his home state, even though John Edwards cited Sanford as his primary inspiration during the 2004 campaign. Chris Hegedus and Nick Doob's Al Franken: God Spoke drew one of the festival's most enthusiastic crowds, although its glib, laudatory portrait never broke the skin. Franken, who took the stage after the screening, declined to confirm his much-rumored run for a 2008 Senate seat in Minnesota, but provided at least a hint of an answer by eschewing humor for rough-hewn talking points. If he is indeed on his way from comedian to candidate, he's got a ways to go.

Similarly soft-focus but a bit less redundant, Mr. Conservative turned its blurry lens on conservative icon Barry Goldwater, whose anti-integration stance cost the Republican Party mightily in 1964. But, as George Will argues, "Goldwater did win. It just took 16 years to count the vote." A forerunner of the Reagan revolution, Goldwater was a hard-line libertarian, which ironically put him at odds with his party on issues like abortion and gays in the military. Produced by Goldwater's granddaughter CC, Mr. Conservative goes easy on its subject, but makes his purported heirs look as if they've run off the road.