One amazing thing about Capturing the Friedmans was the archive footage. Now don’t get me wrong not the fact that they used so much archive footage thats a given for a documentary set on a past event, it was the fact that the family in question (the Friedmans) had filmed so much of their lives and continued on filming themselves and what went on in their house even after Arnold Friedman (the dad) was accused of pedophilia, giving the documentary a deeper look into the actual people who the events are effecting more than any other documentary I can think of.
They seemed to be leaning towards the idea that what they were accused of was a lie, I personally am not really sure either way but it seemed like at the beginning they were leading you towards the more guilty verdict with the evidence they showed and from what people said in interviews but around the second half it began discrediting those sources that it had previously cited to try and lead you towards feeling that they were wrongly accused for the crimes they were arrested for by the end of the film. It was a clever use of cutting up bits of the story and drip feeding you the information in an order that took the audience on a very defined path.
Another interesting thing about Capturing the Friedmans is that it was started by the making of a completely different documentary, it was originally supposed to be about the son of the accused David Friedman who was the most popular children’s entertainer in New York at the time. But the documentary instead ended up about his family and had very little to do with his entertainment career.
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