Cheaper technology and freer standards are producing some extraordinary documentaries. Case in point: “Waltz with Bashir,” the animated film about memory and Middle Eastern conflict which opens at the Tivoli on Friday. It made numerous Top ten lists and is nominated for an Academy Award as best foreign language film. Yet it didn’t make the cut for best documentary feature, a category that still doesn’t click with the general public.

Because of the arcane selection process, popular documentaries such as “Hoop Dreams” and “Crumb” are often overlooked by the Academy, while in any given year, the five nominated films don’t always play in the provinces. Among this year’s nominees, “The Betrayal” (about war-torn Laos) and “The Garden” (about the aftermath of the 1992 L.A. Riots) have not screened in St. Louis.

Yet the other three nominees–”Encounters at the End of the World” (Werner Herzog’s film about the oddballs of Antarctica), “Trouble the Water” (a ground-zero account of Hurricane Katrina) and “Man on Wire” (a thriller about the daredevil who strode between the twin towers of the World Trade Center) were among my favorite films of 2008.

“Man on Wire” is the favorite to win the Oscar. Unlike such recent winners as “Taxi to the Dark Side,” “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Bowling for Columbine,” it’s apolitical, and its heroic story set in pre-9/11 New York should strike a chord with Academy voters of every stripe.

Missourians got their first glimpse of “Man on Wire” at the True/False film festival in Columbia last March. True/False, which opens its sixth edition on Feb. 26, has quickly grown into one of the premier documentary filmfests in the country by celebrating the blurred distinctions between documentary truth and artful fiction. “Man on Wire,” for instance, incorporates a handful of re-created scenes, a technique that was controversial when Erroll Morris did it in “The Thin Blue Line” in 1988 but is commonplace in documentaries today.

David Wilson, the co-director of True/False, said in a phone interview last week that this year’s festival has a slightly broader international focus than in previous years. He and his partner Paul Sturtz culled documentaries from festivals in Copenhagen; Amsterdam; Leipzig, Germany; and Sheffield, England, as well as their usual stops at the Sundance and Toronto filmfests.

Wilson said a recurring theme in recent documentaries is the changing definition of journalism in the Internet era. He pointed to the festival entries “Burma VJ,” about video bloggers in the repressed country that’s now called Myanmar, and “Reporter,” about the New York Times’ Nicholas Krystof fighting to publicize atrocities in the Congo.

Ticket information and film descriptions are online at www.truefalse.org. Wilson expects that all the festival passes will be sold out by the end of this week, but he said that individual tickets will be available starting next Thursday at the festival box office in the Cherry Street Artisan coffee shop in downtown Columbia.

If that’s too dicey for you to justify the two-hour drive to Columbia, there is another documentary filmfest starting in St. Louis next week. The second annual E. Desmond Lee Africa World Film Festival will be presenting 57 documentaries about Africa and its people worldwide. Themes range from genocide and genealogy to comedy and Kwanzaa. The days and venues are Feb. 26 through March 1 at the Missouri History Museum, Lindell Boulevard and DeBaliviere Avenue; Feb. 28 at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 3750 Washington Boulevard; and March 7 at Belas Artes Multicultural Center and Art Gallery, 1854 Russell Boulevard.

Tickets for individual screenings, which are $10 for the general public and $8 for students and seniors, are available at all three locations, as are one-day passes. Four-day passes also are available at the Missouri History Museum.

The  festival is organized by the University of Missouri-St. Louis. More information is available at http://www.cfis-umsl.com or by calling 314-516-5753.