Doha Tribeca Film Festival: The Two Escobars, My Perestroika and Waiting For Superman

The programming at the 2nd Doha Tribeca Film Festival was what you might expect from a recent start-up; aside from the two main competitions – feature-length and short films, all Arab-made or Arab-themed – there was a fairly predictable World Panorama section and a slightly more mystifying Special Screening strand. The World Panorama was solid but random, putting films like Machete next to the likes of Tamara Drewe, with Certified Copy and Meek's Cutoff thrown in for a more hardcore arthouse crowd that I'm not exactly sure lives there. And strewn throughout this section were three somewhat arbitrary US documentaries of varying (albeit OK to excellent) quality.

I'll start with The Two Escobars* (pictured), because, to me, this was by far the best. Directed by Americans Jeff and Michael Zimbalist, it's a gripping and almost faultless telling of the brief media heyday of ruthless drug lord Pablo Escobar, a Forbes-listed billionaire who ran the world's most lucrative cocaine industry and took on both the Colombian government and the CIA in the 80s. But rather than focus on the legendary Pablo himself, however, the Zimbalists use as their prism Colombian footballer Andres Escobar, the player who was shot and killed after scoring an own goal in the 1994 World Cup. At first glance, the two stories seem unconnected, and they don't actually marry up in the way that you think they might (Pablo was dead at the time of Andres' murder). But deep down, there is an incredible story here, one of national pride and politics.

Another, also good, doc in Sundance this year – My Father, Pablo Escobar – told some of this incredible tale, but that was a film somewhat compromised by the need to accommodate the subject, Pablo's traumatised (and still persecuted) son. The Two Escobars, though, has freer rein to look at wider concerns, such as how Pablo became a folk hero with the poor and, crucially, how his bankrolling of the national soccer team made them better than they'd ever been before. With money came confidence, with confidence came success, with success came style... Now, I loathe football, but even I remember the 1994 Colombian team, especially the perm-haired midfielder Carlos 'The Kid' Valderrama.

What I couldn't have known, however, is the serious stuff that was happening off the pitch. Pablo had been dead some six months by the time of the crucial games, but the team were very much still in his cold, controlling shadow. Filling the vacuum Pablo had left, his opponents continued his war, and with carnage in the streets at home, the team had incredible pressure to deliver, both from the fans and the government. The players all received death threats and hired bodyguards, but that's not what took Andres to an early grave. As the film reveals, Andres was a victim of circumstance, and, ironically, might still be alive today if the other Escobar had not himself been assassinated.

(*I've heard rumours that, because the film relies very heavily on FIFA-leased clips, The Two Escobars may not see the light of day on DVD, or at least not in its current form. Which is a shame, because it's an incredibly well-made and thought-provoking doc.)

Less visceral but still stimulating is My Perestroika, by Robin Hessman, which also deals with issues of national identity. Using archive clips and talking-head interviews, it follows the lives of five Russians in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR. Stylistically, it doesn't come with quite the same firepower as The Two Escobars, but it's still a good exploration of the end of an era. For example, anyone puzzled, as I was, as to how the Soviet machine simply seemed to give way overnight in the late 80s will learn from this film that the system had been decaying for years, even at civilian level, and My Perestroika even suggests that a half-hearted loyalty to long-held Communist traditions may have been the main force supporting it. It's also interesting to see ordinary Russians given a voice, and I must say that their calm tones, dry wit and ability to see reason stand in stark contrast to what's been coming out of the equally-in-crisis USA lately.

The last of the three, Waiting For Superman, though decent, was the biggest disappointment. Made by Davis Guggenheim, who directed An Inconvenient Truth, this is a long and slightly repetitive study of the heavily flawed American education system, which favours the individual teacher – to an extraordinary degree – and frowns on reform. I expected to see this at the LFF, but, having seen it, I can see why it wasn't; it's not especially relevant to the UK, since it highlights specifically American problems, in particular a union snafu that is the opposite of ours. I don't really know why it was showing in Doha, since it isn't especially relevant there either, from what I hear. But it does make the point that today's children, wherever they come from, are at the mercy of a lottery system (in the US, literally), and gives us some inspirational teachers along the way, notably the fantastic educational activist Geoffrey Canada, whose dashed childhood fantasies give the film its melancholy title.