Finders Keepers

In 2004 John Wood lost his father in a plane crash and his own leg below the knee. He had the leg mummified and kept it inside a barbecue smoker. Years later, struggling with addiction, he stopped paying for his storage unit, and its contents went to auction. Shannon Whisnant bought the smoker, looked inside, and decided he had found the chance of a lifetime. From there, Bryan Carberry and Clay Tweel's documentary is less about a property dispute than about what each man is actually after. Whisnant wants to be famous; Wood wants to put himself back together. The camera shows what is absurd without laughing at it, because underneath sit a father and son, grief and shame. It premiered at Sundance on 27 January 2015 and runs 82 minutes. Who it's for: Viewers who like documentaries where real life outruns fiction, and portraits of small-town America drawn with sympathy. Who it's not for: The strangeness of the story can hold viewers at a distance from the participants' pain, and the film occasionally gets caught up in that strangeness itself.