Using Up All the Tissues

The theme of Tracy Droz Tragos's personal documentary Be Good, Smile Pretty sprang from an idle Google search the filmmaker did on her dead father's name. Up flashed a witnessed account of his death in Vietnam, when Tragos was four months old. At the time, soon after a telegram arrived bearing the awful news, Tracy's mother packed away her dead husband's photographs, medals and uniform, and remarried. Now, as an adult, Tragos pokes into battered suitcases and asks disquieting questions. Her search for her unknown father awakens buried grief in the entire family.

Eventually, she finds in her father a man of humor, intelligence and love. "The kind of man my father was is exactly the kind of father I crave," Tragos muses. "And that must be why I crave it. Because I was supposed to have it."

Back at the festival's screenings, joy at watching such interesting fare constantly overtook the difficult subject matter. "This is decadent," an audience member whispered to her friend. But given the emotional films, it's no surprise that by mid-Saturday the tissues the organizers had placed outside the theaters were gone.