Boston Globe Reviews Bonnie Blue

This year’s IFFBoston showcases the best in new nonfiction films

By Peter Keough Globe Correspondent,Updated April 21, 2022, 11:57 a.m.

Long regarded as one of the most exciting film events in New England, the Independent Film Festival Boston (April 27-May 4) has lately established itself as a showcase for the best recent documentaries.

Many of the major themes in cinema are executed in these films in masterful and inventive styles, though often in a minor key. Those themes and variations include entrepreneurial capitalism as practiced in illegal abortion clinics and Pez-dispenser pirating; racial and gender justice as seen in a hostage standoff and a high school debating society; and help for the needy and dispossessed as exemplified by trailer parks and catastrophe catering.

As usual, the festival also presents the recent work by outstanding local filmmakers, such as Bestor Cram and Lucia Small.

Listed alphabetically, here’s a sampling of nonfiction standouts on this year’s program.

BONNIE BLUE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF JAMES COTTON

A bracing complement to Jim Farrell’s Buddy Guy tribute, “The Torch” (2019), Cram’s engrossing, toe-tapping documentary about James Cotton, like Guy, another Chicago bluesman, is a warts-and-all portrait of the legendary musician from his beginnings as a 9-year-old orphan on the Bonnie Blue plantation, in Mississippi, to his triumph as one of the greatest blues harmonica players. An acolyte of Sonny Boy Williamson II, Howlin’ Wolf, and Muddy Waters, Cotton was able to make the transition from Delta blues to rock ‘n’ roll. He brought his musical fusion, propelled by powerful harp playing and vocals, to a new audience with the James Cotton Blues Band.