It is the last Fall 07 Stranger Than Fiction screening tonight. Stranger Than Fiction is a documentary series curated by Thom Powers that has become a really fun Tuesday social for NYC doc folk. You get the chance to get a sneak preview of a documentary at the IFC Center followed by a Q&A with the director, followed by drinks somewhere nearby. Simple but effective. I haven’t had a chance to go to a lot of the Fall films this year but I took the opportunity to see Jessica Yu’s The Protagonist last week. I saw The Protagonist at Sundance earlier this year and was really moved by it so I was grateful for the chance to watch it again and it was wonderful to hear Yu talk about it afterwards. The Protagonist evolved when Yu was asked by Greg Carr and Noble Smith of The Carr Foundation to do a project on Euripides. Yu ran with the idea and made a film that, although it does involve Greek puppets reciting lines from Euripides, is mainly about agency, certainty, fate, and crisis in the lives of four contemporary men. The men are very different from each other – a former: German terrorist, evangelist, bank robber and martial arts student (who is also Yu’s husband) – but the similar trajectories of their stories become clear as the film progresses, and in this teasing out of the larger human themes I think Yu has done an incredible job.

Euripides is known for his female characters so it is interesting that the film became such a strong portrait of masculinity. Yu explained that they had originally looked for female characters too but that the women had always had an inkling that something was going wrong whereas the men just powered along blindly and then ran smack into a wall which caused the subsequent transformation.

I know I’m not explaining this very well but it is a film that you really need to see to understand. Luckily it is opening this Friday at the IFC Center so New York folk can catch it very soon.

Tonight Ira Glass and Chris Wilcha are coming to Stranger Than Fiction to preview clips from the TV version of This American Life and to talk about the differences between creating radio and television which I am very interested in since I am just a little bit obsessed with radio. I still think of radio as something incredibly old-fashioned, mysterious and glamorous and am constantly listening to BBC Radio 4 and NPR as I walk around the city or potter around my apartment.

Stranger Than Fiction is back in January for more documentaries and more hob-nobbing. Hooray!