by MATTHEW HAYS

“We found them at the movies,” says Stephen Kijak, co-director (with Angela Christlieb), of the people they found to populate their documentary Cinemania. It’s an obvious answer to an obvious question, after watching their hilarious and beguiling film, in which five rather oddball movie maniacs are profiled.

They’re New Yorkers, of course, and they can’t stay away from the movies, often seeing five a day. One talks about staying away from fibre in his diet so he can avoid those inconvenient bathroom callings that interrupt movies. Another, clearly suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder, shows off her collection of movie memorabilia and her vast movie-ticket pile (she’s kept every single stub from every screening).

“These five are actually famous for their filmgoing in New York,” says Kijak, on the line from his Manhattan office. “Angela was working at a box office at the time. She would see them every day. She was also studying at the New School in their filmmaking program. She just started to film it. We ended up teaming up on it.”

Certainly, Kijak says many of the moviegoers’ antics struck him as very odd. “But most of us share an obsession with cinema. I think many people respond to the film thinking, ‘If only I could live that way—at least for a little while, anyway.’” And many of the stories the five recount indicate a bizarre obsession that doesn’t really sound so healthy. One got into a fight over his favourite place to sit in a cinema, resulting in an arrest; another found herself banned from the Museum of Modern Art for life after allegedly strangling a volunteer usher who dared to tear the cinephile’s ticket in two.

Kijak says he and Christlieb had two films in mind as models for Cinemania: Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer and the Maysles Brother’s legendary gaze into madness, Grey Gardens. The latter film, of course, prompts that nagging question about when and where documentary filmmaking devolves into what one critic has referred to as kookumentary. “The question of exploitation comes up automatically in documentary, particularly when it’s something edgy and strange. This is a funny film, but I don’t believe it’s malicious. The five are all self-aware. They recognize themselves in the movie. They joke about their obsession. These people are not victims.

“We certainly weren’t out to pathologize them. Roberta, in particular, is proud of being obsessive compulsive. She’s proud of her collections of everything to do with the movies.”

Still, Kijak concedes the folks in his movie could hardly be considered role models. “It’s not really a film about filmgoing. It’s about a group of people with an obsession. In a sense, there’s a cautionary tale in Cinemania: too many movies can be a bad thing.”

Cinemania screens as part of Comedia, the Just for Laughs Comedy Film Festival, which runs from July 10–20