Well folks, there is much time to write this blog update because this year’s Full Frame Film Festival coincided with the biggest Nor’easter this country has experienced in 15 years. A hotel room, a laptop, and some coffee — this is my reality right now. The slogan of what NPR termed “The Cannes of documentary film festivals” is “How Much Reality Can You Take?” Now granted, this is not an entirely accurate question (More like “How much MEDIATED reality can you take?”) but it is an interesting one. Particularly when so much of what these film focus on is the ugly side of life — genocide, war, cruelty, poverty, injustice. And yet, with all of them, we are left with a sense of hope. One of the most striking films I viewed, WITHOUT THE KING (produced by Indiepix filmmaker Paola Mendoza) explored Africa’s last absolute monarchy, Swaziland. The small country, with no natural resources, is also one of the few sub-Saharan nations that has not experienced a genocide or civil war in the last couple of decades. Yet, the rate of HIV is a staggering 42.6%, and most of the country lives in such abject poverty that they much scrounge for food in dumpsters. (One of the film’s most repulsive images, and one of the most horrifying things I have ever witnessed on celluloid, was that of young men eating grilled animal intestines plucked from the garbage.) And yet, although the director Michael Skurnick followed the film by saying that this is a nation and peoples on the verge of extinction within 5 years, he also offers a ray of hope in the form of one of the country’s Princesses. After witnessing, at the director’s urging, the suffering of her countrymen, she becomes determined to make change.