Capturing justice... on film?

The film is made, finished, a story you've spent years pursuing. Questionable cops, angry convicts, victims, perpetrators, passersby - you've lent them all your ear, given them a national audience and equal time.

Sure, you're a storyteller looking for a good yarn, but your world isn't some kind of relativist nightmare. You believe there is truth out there, and you make this film to go after it.

But what do you do when you feel you've found it?

"Me, it was my job. I knew Randall Adams was innocent, and it was my job to prove it," says documentarian Errol Morris, who examined the murder of a Texas police officer in his 1988 film "The Thin Blue Line." On the basis of Mr. Morris's investigation and legal intervention, Mr. Adams walked free from death row. No film before or since has inspired such a reversal.

Now, as Oscar night draws near, "Capturing the Friedmans," a nominee easily as controversial as Morris's film, may be staking out similar territory.

The documentary examines the case of a father and son accused of molesting computer students in their Long Island home in the 1980s. On the basis of interviews by director Andrew Jarecki that reveal new information about the case, son Jesse Friedman - paroled after 13 years in prison - is seeking to have his guilty plea on 245 charges of sexual abuse vacated by the court that sentenced him when he was 19.

"Yes, my father admitted that he was a pedophile, [but] I am not a child molester, and I don't think it's appropriate for me to have to answer for the sins of my father," he says on camera.

That puts Mr. Jarecki in a tough position. Critics overwhelmingly praised his film, released last summer, as evenhanded and provocative. Though it does imply an injustice has been done - that father Arnold Friedman, who died in prison in 1995, had previous sexual contact with minors but not his students, and that Jesse was probably innocent - it carefully balances opposing views.

Several hours of supplemental footage on a DVD version released in January, though, paint a more damning picture of the investigation. An interview with an alleged victim casts his testimony into strong doubt, and interviews with detectives underscore the extent to which they coaxed and bullied testimony from Friedman's 8- to 11-year-old students.

Last week, two of these former students, now in their 20s, wrote an anonymous letter to Academy Awards voters urging them not to reward the film for making Jesse Friedman a celebrity. "We did not lie. We did not exaggerate. We were never hypnotized to tell our stories," they wrote.

Jarecki insists that, with or without the extra footage, his film is no apology for Friedman. He has, however, submitted an affidavit on Jesse's behalf to the Nassau County Court and is allowing Jesse to present interview footage to a judge in the hopes of reopening his case.

"This kind of film isn't really the format for [advocacy]," Jarecki says, "but the information in the film is what it is, and if Jesse wants to use it in his motion, that's his right."

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