Showcasing reel talents

NEWBURYPORT - Two films rooted in the Bay State will be on top of the marquee when the fourth annual Newburyport Documentary Film Festival kicks off Friday.

"The Times Were Never So Bad: The Life Of Andre Dubus," by Rhode Island novelist and filmmaker Edward J. Delaney, is Friday night's featured film. It's an intimate look at the life and work of the late Dubus, who spent his later years in Haverhill, until his death in 1999. His story is told through interviews with family members and friends, including his son Andre Dubus III, who lives in Newbury, and daughter Suzanne, not far away in New Hampshire.

Delaney grew up in Fall River, a place much like Dubus's Haverhill, and he worked in newspapers for years, then switched to teaching and writing fiction in the 1990s. "I just learned fiction writing by reading the work of people I thought were great writers, and Andre Dubus was one," said Delaney, now a professor at Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I. "I felt that Dubus had been a mentor for me without ever knowing it."

When Delaney looked to expand his reach into film, a documentary was the natural choice for a journalist on a very low budget. "The only thing I did not do in this movie was the music. I was the cameraman slash interviewer slash sound person. So I knew that what I was looking for had to be an interview-based project," Delaney said. "I had to sit people down and get them to tell me stories and hope that the stories were of interest."

Delaney's novel "Warp & Weft" was published in 2004, and it won the L.L. Winship/ PEN New England Award, given annually to a New England author or a book with a New England setting. At a ceremony at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, Andre III was the emcee and noted proudly that his father had won the very first such award back in the 1970s. For Delaney, looking for a film subject, a lightbulb went on.

"After one hour [interviewing] Suzanne, I knew this was going to work out," Delaney said. "All of the Dubuses, not just young Andre, are tremendous storytellers. . . . I wasn't having to pull things out of people. They were just telling it like it was."

Delaney said he could have created an entire film out of interviews with Andre III and Suzanne, but many others, including a Dubus cousin, James Lee Burke, contributed greatly.

Delaney is proudest that his film focuses not just on his subject's colorful life, but also on his work.

"Writers are often taught to 'write what you know,' with the assumption that is to write what you have a handle on, what you feel confident you have a controlled perspective on," he said. "What you find again and again is that the things Andre Dubus wrote about are the things that bothered him, things that ate away at him, the scabs that he had to itch. He went back again and again to things he had a hard time solving. So I think the process involves going to those places you'd rather not go to find the truth, and I think that to some degree that's a great lesson for anybody who is attempting to write."

The women profiled in Beth Murphy's "Beyond Belief," the festival's featured piece on Saturday night, also went to places that many others would have avoided.

Susan Retik of Needham and Patti Quigley of Wellesley were ordinary suburban moms until Sept. 11, 2001. Retik's husband, David, was on American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to hit the World Trade Center. Quigley's husband, Patrick, was on United Flight 175, which hit the second tower. But instead of retreating into themselves, they formed Beyond the 11th, a group dedicated to improving the desperate lives of widows halfway around the world in Afghanistan, a prime Al Qaeda training ground.

"My background is in international relations . . . and I have found it difficult to connect American audiences with what is happening abroad," said Murphy, of North Falmouth. "And after Sept. 11 it was very clear that a sort of xenophobic fervor had taken over in America. To wrestle with what they were doing, and to see two people who you may have expected to have participated in that fervor doing the opposite, that was very incredible. . . . At least for me, it made me look internally - if they can do this, what am I doing? And I hope it might make other people ask the same questions."

They began with fund-raising bike rides, and eventually traveled to Kabul, with Murphy and cameraman Sean Flynn in tow, to meet some of the women they were helping. "I really see them still as an incredible bridge between cultures," Murphy said.

Murphy's work was named best film at the Woods Hole Film Festival this year.

Both films will be followed by meet-the-filmmakers parties. Most events are held at the Screening Room movie theater or the Firehouse Center for the Arts in downtown Newburyport. There are a variety of ticket options, from a $7 single ticket to a $60 all-access pass that includes a special event at the Licorice & Sloe Co. tea house on Friday evening. Information and tickets are available at the event's website, newburyportfilmfestival.org.