Marquee geek

The Independent Film Festival of Boston offers the serious, the groundbreaking - and the odd

Back in the day, to be obsessed with Bigfoot, to devote hours to role-playing games, or to pore over science textbooks automatically branded you a dweeb. To admit any hobby other than one within the acceptable range from sports to - well, to sports - you may as well have had the word "geek" inked on your forehead.

But if the Independent Film Festival of Boston has a cri de coeur this year, it's "Geeks unite!" You might be a gawky adolescent collecting tropical fish, as in the pitch-perfect coming-of-age short "Aquarium" (shot partly at the New England Aquarium). Or you might be a middle-age crooner in "Song Sung Blue," eking out a living playing Milwaukee bars as a Neil Diamond imitator. If you've got an inexplicable, socially questionable passion, you can go for it. So says IFFBoston this year.

"Geek culture is the thing that drives popular culture," said Nancy Campbell, an IFFBoston managing director. "Anyone who's ever been a geek knows at some point the mainstream co-opts it." The festival's film-selection committee comes from that culture, she said. "Being a movie lover, you're relegated to the not-norm. You see seven to 10 films a week and you're [not considered normal]."

This not-normalcy gets expressed as geeky folks obsessed with acquiring specialized knowledge or mastering odd pursuits. There's the doc "Jump!," directed by Helen Hood Scheer, which explores the world of competitive jump roping. "The Linguists" celebrates the globetrotting efforts of the Living Tongues Institute of Endangered Languages. Idiosyncratic scientists and thinkers at McMurdo Station, Antarctica - zoologists, philosophers, plumbers - star in Werner Herzog's sometimes ponderous but always interesting "Encounters at the End of the World," as they do in Alex Karpovsky's "Woodpecker," a mockumentary about an obsessed birder's search for the supposedly not-extinct ivory-billed woodpecker.

Lives in these movies revolve around infatuations. The trick, say some filmmakers, is not to pass judgment or make fun of their subjects, no matter how seemingly dorky or trivial their pursuits.

Jay Delaney's debut feature documentary, "Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie," profiles two rural Ohio Bigfoot researchers named Dallas and Wayne. Delaney said he was aware of the sensitive relationship between him and his subjects as they "let me into their lives."

"When you find that [trust] with someone, you have an even greater responsibility to respect that, and value that," Delaney said in a telephone interview. "To show them as complete human beings."

For the documentary "Second Skin," filmmakers took six months searching for subjects obsessed with online role-playing games. Eventually, they settled on four subjects, intercutting between them to explore the appeal of the massively popular "World of Warcraft" and "EverQuest" games.

Many potential subjects refused to participate, fearful of the geek label, said writer-producer Victor Piñeiro Escoriaza. He had to reassure them that he and his co-filmmakers were sympathetic gamers themselves. "We're emphasizing the human aspect of the people behind the game."

Geeky themes resonate strongly in three shorts: the creepy-crawly Darwinian world of bugs, amphibians, and reptiles in "Safari"; a competitive club for inventors in "Primitive Technology"; and a mysterious message encountered by '60s-era astronauts in "The Drift." Full-blown sci-fi geeks will revel in IFFBoston's first foray into Japanese anime, "Vexille"; the Spanish "Time Crimes," a Hitchcockian thriller complicated by time travel; and "Dreams With Sharp Teeth," a portrait of speculative fiction writer Harlan Ellison.

Other narratives in the festival focus on introverted people with quirks that almost guarantee relationship failure. In the sober but touching "Momma's Man," director Azazel Jacobs depicts Mikey, a new father, on a visit to his parents during which he regresses to childhood to the point of ignoring frantic calls from his wife. Similarly, "Goliath" is about a likable loser whose life crumbles as his wife and cat leave him.

Romantic quirks are further on display in the shorts. "The Lonely Bliss of Cannonball Luke" is an 11-minute romantic comedy about a human cannonball whose act causes conflict with a girlfriend. In "Mr. P," a phone-sex worker seeks the counsel of a teenage boy to get his life back on track. A shy kid falls in love in zombie-ridden Australia in "I Love Sarah Jane," and "Well-Founded Concerns" shows a germaphobe getting the girl when a plague strikes. Big-eared geek "Tony Zoreil," looking for love, suffers persecution.

The nerd hypothesis can also be applied to directors whose devotion to their craft can only be appreciated by film aficionados. Take "Film Makes Us Happy", a self-examination of how filmmaking wrecks a marriage; or "Apocalypse Oz," an offbeat fusion-tribute to "Apocalypse Now" and "Wizard of Oz."

Most exuberant in their salute to geekdom are the documentaries "Nerdcore Rising" and "We Are Wizards." The former tails "nerdcore" music genre pioneer MC Frontalot on tour and showcases the topics - Star Wars lasers, Asperger's syndrome, robots - he raps about. The latter delves into the Harry Potter "wizard rock" music phenomenon. (Both MC Frontalot and Massachusetts-based Harry and the Potters will perform at IFFBoston.) For pure, unadulterated geeked-out bliss, check out the eponymous Joy Division documentary. The late, great frontman Ian Curtis's cringe-worthy yet mesmerizing dance recorded by late-'70s-early-'80s-era concert footage is alone worth the price of admission.

"People are afraid to be uninhibited," said Greg Kohs, director-producer of "Song Sung Blue," the portrait of the Neil Diamond/Patsy Cline tribute duo (and husband and wife team). Kohs said audience members at the performers' shows would initially ridicule them because they were uncomfortable with how impassioned they were. But "in the film, people become forgiving and accepting of their lifestyle because they are so real," Kohs said. "They are not faking it. They are not contrived."

Jay Delaney takes the analysis of his Bigfoot enthusiasts a step further. "I think that they've figured out that a lot of life is just about chasing passions and not giving up. They have this hope and they act on this hope. Even in the face of people making fun of it."

Geekdom transcends the norm. In the words of a T-shirt for sale at the "Second Skin" website, next to a silhouette of a sword-wielding hero: "I've outleveled this content."

Rock on, wizards and physicists.

Ethan Gilsdorf is writing a book titled "Escape Artists: Travels Through the Worlds of Role Playing Freaks, Online Gaming Geeks, and Other Dwellers of Imaginary Realms."