It’s very difficult to see short films and especially short documentary films outside of a film festival. Full Frame Documentary Shorts, Vol. 1 is a great collection of films that range from humorous to heart-wrenching. I laughed almost the entire way through Mira Nair’s documentary on the Laughing Clubs of India and I fell in love with the Mah Jong playing women of “We Got Us”. There is also a great portrait of a couple who have a family business that cleans up crime scenes and the fascinating story of the phone booth in the middle of the Mojave Desert and the people that were drawn to it. The DVD is like a well-programmed documentary screening at a film festival.

This collection of seven documentary shorts is tall on diversity. The wide-ranging subject matter includes such intriguing themes as: a business for cleaning up gory crime scenes; the congregation, in public, of hundreds of people meditating by laughing their saris off; and the unlikley, iconic status of a lone telephone booth in the middle of the desert. The fascinating characters include four gorgeous, old dolls who grant us with a candid (and at times tawdry) glimpse at their younger selves and, later, a few of the colorful residents of the last flophouse still operating in The Bowery. We are also confronted with the heart-wrenching reality of a family in crisis and asked to briefly consider the relative obscurity of a take-one girl.

The material is varied, fresh, and ultra-quirky, and it is presented in a raw, unscripted manner which I thoroughly appreciated.