AIFF documentaries showcase bonds between individuals

"The Edge of Eden: Living with Grizzlies" asks the audience to make a shift in point of view, which, actually, is what all well-crafted documentaries should do. The shift is how grizzlies are perceived by man. Charlie Russell, a Canadian bear expert, lives six months of the year on the rim of Russia's most western wilderness where he rescues and raises grizzly cubs. It is a stunning setting, the cinematography spectacular.

Over the course of one season Russell becomes the surrogate mother for two young cubs, watching over them not as if they were cute pets, but with the goal of releasing them into the wild. There is much the cubs must learn if they are to survive. After years of living with grizzlies Russell demonstrates, in scene after scene, that grizzlies are neither aggressive nor are they killers; rather, they are surprisingly gentle creatures, unlike the preconceived ideas nurtured by folklore.

Nevertheless, grizzlies have been hunted relentlessly with little understanding of the possible relationship that could exist between one of nature's most spectacular creatures and man. The loss is ours, as this truly wonderful film demonstrates.

"Arctic Son," a nice play on words, is set in the tiny Native Gwitchin village of Old Crow (population 300) 80 miles north of the Arctic Circle. A father and son, who have not seen each other for more than 20 years, are reunited.

The son, Stanley Jr., who grew up living with his mother in Seattle, suddenly finds himself in a world profoundly different from the one he has always known. He immediately experiences a sense of dislocation and culture shock. Nothing he has ever done has prepared him for the harsh and demanding life of this northern wilderness.

Yet, as father and son fashion a bond, and the father begins to share the lessons passed on to him by the elders, the son begins to find new purpose and meaning in his life. The tension that is sustained nicely throughout the film is between modernity and a way of life which still mirrors that of a hundred years ago. It is a tension that is never overwrought, but rather expressed in small moments which, in the aggregate, ask a great deal of both father and son.