by MATTHEW HAYS

The kids populating Spellbound, Jeffrey Blitz's Oscar-nominated documentary, all appear as an incredibly endearing group of innocents. They are aspiring to win the American national spelling bee, and you can see that they're often being pushed a bit too far by their parents, but they still maintain an incredible composure that somehow makes them above rat-race ambition. They seem to be in the race for the right reasons, to out-best themselves rather than anyone else.

As we meet the kids, Spellbound becomes an inadvertent bit of American propaganda. The kids come from all over the country, and some from beyond, including a couple of kids from India. They all speak of their love of living in a place so diverse and multicultural, as they study up on the various spellings of obscure words.

The best bits come when the kids venture to the microphone and take their shot at spelling something. There are painful moments of defeat, rapturous moments of victory and then, in long, arduous, detail, the facial contortions of one young lad as he stumbles over a seemingly unfathomable word. It's excruciating to watch someone so young, who probably should be free of such pressure, clearly suffering under duress.

Spellbound doesn't really attempt to be an indictment of the parents. There's no JonBonet scandal here, though the parents often do seem extremely odd. (The kids, after all, seem to enjoy competing, and the competition itself is over intellect and not a beauty contest.) Rather, this emerges as a beautiful group portrait of a handful of very diverse children before they reach that entirely complex stage of puberty. Captured before they've learned to hide much of themselves from the rest of the world, they appear unguarded, often hilarious and vulnerable - in other words, as pure, unfiltered human beings. Thanks to their winning personalities, Spellbound becomes one of those outstanding documentaries that takes an ostensibly dull event (a spelling bee) and makes it completely unforgettable.

Spellbound opens Friday, July 25 at Cinéma du Parc

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