A deserving winner of the Grand Jury Prize earlier this year at the Sundance Film Festival, Andrew Jarecki's compelling documentary takes a Rashomon-like look at the Friedmans, a family torn apart by accusations of child molestation in the late Eighties. By turns deadly serious and semi-voyeuristic, the film provides few answers to the questions it raises, but that doesn't detract a whit from its impact.

Arnold Friedman was a seemingly typical middle-class husband and father in Great Neck, New Jersey. Long married to wife Elaine and the father of three sons, David, Seth and Jesse, he was an award-winning teacher, a musician and - luckily for director Jarecki - a compulsive photographer and Super 8 movie nut. He was also, it turns out, a collector of child pornography, specifically magazines featuring young boys. When he was arrested for possession of those magazines, a family's worst nightmare began to unfold, a nightmare wherein family members were pitted against one another while trying to present a united front against a vicious and vindictive community as well as an overly zealous and possibly deluded police force. And, thanks to the Friedman family's obsession with the moving image, it was all caught on film and videotape.

Anyone who was of age in the late eighties will remember the hysteria that arose south of the border concerning what was thought to be an epidemic of child sexual abuse. Much of it was shown to be a product of police- and/or psychologist-induced false memory syndrome in the minds of the child 'victims,' but that didn't help the adults whose lives were destroyed by the accusations. A big part of Capturing the Friedmans deals with this issue; Arnold, who was accused and convicted of multiple counts of sodomy arising out of his basement-held computer classes for neighbourhood children is most certainly a victim of this hysteria, as was his co-accused, his then 18-year-old son Jesse. But the film also makes it plain that something else - perhaps just as sinister - was going on, both within the Friedman family and possibly extending outward to the community.

The glue that holds the film together is the extensive Friedman family footage recorded by father Arnold and, later, his sons, detailing the seeming normalcy of the Friedman family. It serves both as poignant counterpoint to the proceedings and a reminder that the image can lie just as easily as it can serve truth. In a film full of ironies and ambiguity, it is supremely ironic that Arnold and Jesse's trial was the first to allow cameras in the courtroom. What unfolds is tragedy in the best, most classical sense of the word.