DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.

Photo of the AFI Silver marquee by Flickr user kendrickhang.

It looks like MTV’s Real World is coming to D.C. just in time. With the new show set to start shooting during the closing weekend of SILVERDOCS, that gives the producers a solid week to head up to Silver Spring on a daily basis and see how reality filmmaking is done. Either that, or they’ll spend the week arguing over which bedroom arrangement is most likely to result in the greatest number of cast member hookups.

Their loss. SILVERDOCS is not only far and away the best film festival in the D.C. area, but in just six years has become one of the premier documentary film festivals in the world. Many films that end up with Best Documentary Academy Award nominations screen at the festival, which is attended by some of the biggest names in documentary filmmaking. In short, if you live in or around D.C. and skip SILVERDOCS, it’s akin to living in Cannes or Park City and skipping their festivals. (OK, not exactly, but you get the idea). There are well over 100 films to choose from, and don’t be discouraged if your choices are sold out: it’s almost always possible to get into sold-out screenings via the standby line, and even if you don’t, there’s surely something else of interest playing so you won’t have wasted a trip.

What follows is, as is always the case with this column, hardly a comprehensive overview of the festival, but rather a rundown of some of the highlights, and the movies and events this critic would be sure to attend with unlimited time and no pesky day job getting in the way.

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High Profile Screenings

Opening & Closing Night screenings, as well as the Centerpiece film for any festival are usually big deals, and SILVERDOCS has an excellent trio lined up. Opening night features More Than a Game, a documentary ostensibly about LeBron James’ rise to the NBA. But rather than a profile of the player, the film documents the entire team James played on in high school, which went on to win the national championship. Director Kristopher Belman began filming James and his teammates throughout their high school careers; this documentary is about all of them, and is the end result of years of work. The Centerpiece screening is of A.J. Schnack’s Convention, which, despite the title, is not yet another political documentary, but a film about what it takes to mount the gargantuan effort that is the modern political convention. Schnack employed over a half dozen fellow documentarians to shoot behind the scenes in Denver last year. And finally, in the Closing Night choice, a subject near and dear to every Washingtonian’s heart: Dana Flor and Toby Oppenheimer’s The Nine Lives of Marion Barry examines a figure familiar to us all, from his rise as a genuine political hero in this city up to the present day. Barry himself will be on hand for next Saturday’s premiere.