Truth Seeker

In the final days of 2008, Brandon Darby — a one-time radical leftist activist from Austin, Texas— typed an open letter to the internet, in which he owned up to media allegations that he was the incriminating FBI informant in the case of the Texas Two, a pair of college kids arrested for possession of Molotov cocktails at the 2008 Republic National Convention. They'd been demonised by the media, portrayed as domestic terrorists, and imprisoned thanks to the testimony —they said entrapment— of Darby. To some, Darby was a hero; to most, he was a snitch.

“People have really strong responses one way or the other,” says Jamie Meltzer, the documentarian —and professor of documentary history at Stanford— who's profiled Darby in the awesome Informant. “We have some great arguments in the Q&As! Standing up and yelling at each other, denouncing Brandon, or denouncing me for not denouncing Brandon. I knew I was stepping into that territory, so all of that has only been satisfying.”

From the moment Meltzer read Darby's open letter, he saw him as a 'perfect' documentary subject: “someone who does something that opens up a lot of really intriguing questions, which you can then explore for the next three years you'll be making the film.” Taking the Errol Morris approach, in a fashion similar to Bart Layton's Oscar-winning The Imposter, Meltzer sits down his unreliable narrator in front of the camera, dramatically recreates his testimony, and then calls it all into question; making for a fascinating study in the slippery notions of truth and reality.

“The challenge in this film was working with this really controversial character and respect the audience enough to let them come to their own conclusions about who he was and what he did,” offers Meltzer. “Brandon trusted me, but he also was aware that I wasn't making a puff-piece. And it was difficult because I knew that, to make a good film, I had to betray him. I had to betray everybody in the film. I knew it was that kind of a movie: for it to be successful, nobody who was in the film could be 100% happy with it.”

“Really early on,” Meltzer continues, “the one thing that let me know that I definitely had a film in this, was that I'd spent a whole day talking to Brandon, interviewing him, and you'd understand him, and really see things from his point of view, and really feel for him. And then the next day I went and talked to Scott Crow —who almost turns out to be Brandon's nemesis in the film— and I was completely under his spell. I realised this was going to be a film about conflicting perspectives, where almost everyone on camera is unreliable.”

In short: a film about an unreliable narrator becomes a puzzle of conflicting opinions, all of which are just as unreliable. “I wanted to put viewers in that uncomfortable position of asking them: 'What do you think happened? Who do you think is telling the truth? Is anyone telling the truth?'” Meltzer says. “Essentially what I'm doing is putting viewers in the same position I was in when I was making the film, where you're figuring out who you believe, and trying to find answers.”

WHAT: Human Rights Film Festival
WHEN & WHERE: Thursday 16 May, ACMI Cinemas