By Gabriel Paletz

Murderball.

A documentary is a hometown microscope and global satellite. It polishes history and explodes current clichés; turns portraits into social panoramas. At Full Frame, North Carolina first lady Mary Easley called documentary “the caviar of the moving image junkie.” Non-fiction also remains the most democratic film form in its array of subjects and styles. As befits documentary’s broad appeal, filmmakers and audiences mixed throughout the festival, up to the final Southern barbecue.

In Battaglia, photographer Letizia Battaglia (one of the festival’s indomitable screen women) describes herself as “like a drunk who . . . sits in every bar to drink a glass of wine. I like to sit and drink a glass of reality.” Sampling among the festival’s special programs, tributes to Ken and Rick Burns, Martin Scorsese and Sicilian documentarian Vittorio de Seta, plus the 77 films in competition, shows how documentaries excel at certain combinations:

Mixing the local and global. Full Frame presented two programs, “Why War?” and “Going Home.” “Why War?” featured Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight as well as the opening night premiere, Bearing Witness, which examines the professional and personal lives of five female journalists. The coverage and costs of global war, beyond the superficial treatment of these issues in the media, resonated with illuminations of home, as in Family Name, which digs up the ties of slavery through filmmaker Macky Alston’s family tree. The films in competition brought together customs (Bride Kidnapping in Kyrgyzstan, family life (the remarkably shot The Shape of the Moon) and institutions (foreign inmates in the women’s prison in Quito, Ecuador, in >Pack Strap Swallow) from around the world.

Demystifying the present and restoring the past. Full Frame’s movies ranged from the strategies of idealistic and manipulative American campaign managers in Bolivia (Our Brand Is Crisis) to the resistance against sex education in darkest Texas (The Education of Shelby Knox). The festival entries restored the history of a profession (female telephone operators in The Phantom of the Operator) and presented a mini history of cinema in features on the careers of Mary Pickford, Lew Wasserman and Henri Langlois and on the fate of Heaven’s Gate.

Portraying societies through vivid individuals. The illuminations of social issues through personalities proved the statement of filmmaker Cynthia Hill (The Guestworker<) that “a big part of documentaries is casting.” Whether Shelby Knox or Henri Langlois, a documentary star is inseparable from larger social life. Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt poignantly restores childhood memories lost to the musician through treatments for mental illness.

Barbecue and caviar. Full Frame served up celebrated features, such as Mondovino, Tell Them Who You Are and Murderball, with shorts that were the festival’s caviar in terms of excellence, as well as popular discoveries you will not find in theaters. A 10:45 p.m. program demonstrated how non-fiction shorts remain as vital now as for filmmakers of the Left Bank in France, Free Cinema in Britain and Direct Cinema in the States. The program began with the Danish Max by Chance, which uses witty voice-over, family photos and digital animation on found footage to show the chain of occurrences leading to the filmmaker’s birth and growth. Cheeks portrays a family of Southern gothic characters in southern New Jersey, with the voice-over of the son, crazed father and manic-depressive mother over largely motionless B&W images of the three at home. Phantom Limb recaptures the loss of a brother in childhood through devices such as footage from 1930s unemployment lines, and the shearing of a sheep in slow motion to visualize filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt’s naked feelings. By displacing his loss into uncommon emblems, the filmmaker enlarges the audience’s empathy with his grief.

None of these films lasts more than 30 minutes. Each is indelible, as was the Polish short For a Miracle, which displays compassion for its handicapped subjects, but not for the church that guides them or their hapless pilgrimage by train to Lourdes. The festival successfully mixed crowd-pleasers like Murderball with unflinching fare such as For a Miracle and The Children of Leningradsky.

This year the festival opened a new venue in a tobacco warehouse, won sponsorship from the New York Times and funding from the Academy Foundation, and entered into partnership with Duke University. It has rebaptized its location in Durham, N.C., “Realitywood.” Yet Full Frame remains a concentrated and intimate festival that proves the vitality of documentary. Scorsese commented that non-fiction films “are magic to me. I always try to draw from their emotional power” in his movies. If you didn’t yet know that now is a ripe time for documentary, then Full Frame brings enlightenment, while it confirms the faith of the already hip.