Capturing justice... on film?

Once you've released a documentary on such a controversial subject, says Jarecki, its resonance and repercussions are out of your hands. "Now the issue is transitioning to a new setting," he says, "and it's not a setting in which I have much relevance because the stakes are not mine."

But here's the problem, filmmakers say: Telling a story, any story, demands a dizzying number of difficult, subjective editorial choices. First, you choose your interviewees - and though you try to be fair, you can't talk to everybody. Some days you just make your best guess.

Then, in the editing, 90 percent of what you've learned falls to the cutting-room floor. Worthless stuff? Crucial details? How will your audience ever know?

"There's so much power in editing," says documentary filmmaker Charlie Thompson of Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies. "About all we can hope for is to be aware of the editorial pitfalls along the way. That's what I always keep in my front pocket - the remembrance that we are staying true to everyone who grants us an interview."

Marco Williams, a documentarian and film professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, agrees. The best any of us can do, he says, is to "stand in the place where your personal convictions are, acknowledge that place, and try to give a truthful interpretation of the reality you see from there."

The style of documentary this implies - one that takes as a subject its director's own biases - is very much in vogue, and has proved wildly successful in films like Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine."

But the idea makes Morris uncomfortable.

In "The Thin Blue Line," he says, "you never see my investigation. You see the results of it, yes, but you don't see me following David Harris [who at the film's end obliquely confesses to murder] around for five months afraid for my own life."

That kind of exposure would have been gratuitous, Morris says, because everything about the film speaks to his own preoccupations and artistic vision.

Sometimes to a fault. Morris admits he walked a fine ethical line in researching the story. Trained as a private investigator, he used access to interviewees and records granted him as a filmmaker to conduct his own investigation of the case. In the end, he says, it was that meticulously gathered evidence, not the film, that got Adams's conviction overturned.

Though Morris did have qualms about his dual role, he says his certainty that Texas was preparing to execute an innocent man trumped those concerns.

"I'm not saying there's no such thing as a general ambiguity in the world, but I think there are some questions that have answers, and those answers have to be pursued," he says. "Thinking doesn't make it so. There is a real world out there, and I think it is our job to try to understand it."

Jarecki says as far as the Friedmans' story goes, though, his job has come to an end.

"The Friedmans are a complex group, and not much more fun to work with than they appear in the film," he says. "Still, they are entitled to the freedoms they have under the law."

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