Race is, in part, a concept. But whether that concept is fluid or fixed is a matter of perspective. This year’s Festival lineup offers a number of films, both fiction and non-fiction, that tackle that thorny subject. On the documentary front there are films that provocatively and directly confront the ways that racism has become entrenched in American society, while many of the narrative films explore nuanced worlds in which race is an undercurrent rather than the primary storyline.

Treating race coolly – not letting that polemicized behemoth overwhelm a movie – is its own commentary on race. Touching more directly on themes of class or sense of place, these narrative films raise the specter of race and then let the subject dissipate. Early in Lance Hammer’s Ballast, a white character stops by a black man’s home to make sure he’s okay since he hasn’t shown up at work recently. Ballast is going to be a movie about race, the viewer thinks. It has to be – it’s even set in the Mississippi Delta. But Ballast isn’t about race; it’s about dignity and the arduous battle to store it up in the face of enduring sorrow. Hammer focuses on three black characters who have to scratch out a life together against some very tough odds. “I’m white – it makes sense for white filmmakers to talk about white subjects and black ones to talk about black ones and Asian ones to talk about Asian ones but I wish it wasn’t that way,” Hammer said. “I wish there were more filmmakers talking about races other than their own.”

Courtney Hunt’s emotionally taut Frozen River spotlights the collision of two poor women – Lila Littlewolf, who lives on the Mohawk reservation that straddles the Canadian-U.S. border, and Ray Eddy, whose wage from the Yankee One Dollar Store doesn’t nearly cover the costs of raising two sons. Lila and Ray’s unlikely but poignant relationship begins when Lila steals Ray’s car, they end up smuggling Chinese and Pakistani immigrants across the border using Mohawk land (which the police can’t enter) as a cover.

“I don’t usually work with whites,” Lila hisses at Ray the day they strike up an uneasy agreement to start smuggling in earnest. The viewer expects Hunt to detail the historic racial enmity between the Mohawk people and Americans, but she lets that topic fall by the wayside. Hunt is much more interested in the cruel, ironic, and even redeeming power of poverty to induce attachments between people who suspect they should be one another’s enemy.

“When you look at the storytelling of independent film, a lot of it talks about general diversity, about trying to establish identities that have to do with insight into people,” said Festival Director Geoffrey Gilmore. “And in that way, the work that we have at the Festival this year depicts race and doesn’t try to represent stereotypes. In these films, race does not define the characters.”

In Neil Abramson’s American Son, about a young black Marine visiting his hometown of Bakersfield, Calif. before deploying to Iraq, the racially diverse characters flow into one another’s worlds with almost total ease. Abramson modeled the film on the racial nonchalance he saw in Bakersfield. “People of the same economic strata were hanging out together, regardless of race,” he said. “I think the biggest divide is how much people make. That’s not to say that there’s still not a big race divide in this country, but I didn’t want to focus so much on color.” Instead, American Son is about “the state of the country and someone coming to realize that he’s going to war,” Abramson said.

The tendency among Festival filmmakers this year to treat race as a secondary narrative thread rather than the main event may reflect a shift in the way that race informs individual identity in America. In 2000, the U.S. Census allowed Americans to choose more than one race for the first time on the census form. “That’s the beginning of a change” in how Americans think about race, according to New America Foundation fellow Gregory Rodriguez, whose book Mongrels, Bastards, Orphans, and Vagabonds: Mexican Immigration and the Future of Race in America was published last fall. “When you can click more than one box, it tells you something about the nature of race; the very fact that you are allowed to choose more than one suggests that it is more of a malleable category than was once believed.”

The prevalence of feature films that treat race obliquely does not mean that race is no longer an engrossing topic for filmmakers. Matthew Stanton’s directorial debut North Starr is about a Houston gang member who becomes marooned in the Texas countryside only to find that a rural black man who seems to act like all the white people in the town has a number of things to teach him. He ends up living in the village and encountering a particularly virulent kind of unfiltered, vengeful racism. “It wasn’t that long ago that we were living in a dark age, culturally speaking,” Stanton commented.

If, as Rodriguez suggests, race is becoming a more malleable concept, it is not necessarily more malleable everywhere; several powerful documentaries screening at the Festival this year focus on how the past continues to fuel racism in the here and now. Marc Evans’ In Prison My Whole Life examines racism through the lens of the fight for a new trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal, currently serving a life sentence for the murder of a police officer, and Ellen Kuras and Thavisouk Phrasavath’s Nerakhoon (The Betrayal), which in addition to chronicling the effect of U. S. military involvement in Laos, addresses the racism Phrasavath and many Laotians were subjected to after immigrating to the U.S. “It’s not that we wanted to come to the U.S.; our education here [in the U.S.] doesn’t open up to peoples from other lands – we’re taught that America is the greatest land and that ignorance is partly why I experienced racism here,” Phrasavath said.

Margaret Brown’s The Order of Myths, about the two Mardi Gras celebrations in Mobile Alabama – one for white people and one for black people – was originally going to be about carnivals in general. But after Brown learned that the ancestors of the white Mardi Gras queen had owned the last slave ship that entered Mobile, and that the ancestors of the black Mardi Gras queen had been slaves on that ship, her focus changed.

The leaders of both Mardi Gras make tentative and awkward efforts to be open towards one another, but most of the doc’s subjects, both black and white, seem fixated on the word “tradition” and all of its Southern implications. “One person’s tradition might be another person’s pain,” Brown said. “That word deserves some careful examination.”

Katrina Browne and Jude Ray's Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North confronts America’s original sin of slavery even more directly. Browne’s ancestors were the nation’s largest slave-trading family. The film presents a revealing analysis of what’s become known as white liberal guilt as Browne and nine of her relatives follow the route their forebears used to ship human cargo.

Like the other Festival films that tackle race, Traces of the Trade looks both to the past and to the present. “I’m motivated now by grief as a citizen who cares; I can connect the dots to the past,” Browne said. After screening Traces of the Trade at the Festival, she’s going on a nationwide tour to speak to students and churches about the film and her family’s past. “I would argue that a lot of white Americans aren’t racist in the old-fashioned sense,” she said. “It’s a new set of dynamics of being afraid of being accused of being racist. Everything traces back to those original sins; the old language doesn’t work.”