AJ Schnack returned to SILVERDOCS last night with the world premiere screening of his latest, Convention. Schnack received the festival’s Cinematic Vision Award a few years back for his About a Boy, an elegiac tribute to Kurt Cobain featuring taped interviews with the singer combined with filmed images of the places where he lived and grew up. It was an acquired taste as a film, but even its detractors couldn’t deny it’s simple beauty. For his latest feature, though, Schnack was required to take a far more journalistic approach, as he set out to cover the behind-the-scenes workings of the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver.

While the new film may be more traditional documentary fare in content, Schnack is not without a new trick up his sleeve. For this project, he rounded up a group of other documentarians with the aim of making a collaborative documentary over the course of the short few days of the Convention. Each filmmaker was given a subject to follow for the entirety of the shoot, the result being that we, as the viewer, are often allowed to be in multiple places simultaneously, taking in the same event from a number of different vantage points and perspectives. The effect is that the viewer feels nearly as omniscient as one often does in a fiction film, only with real events.