This wild documentary about George ‘King’ Coulam’s renaissance festival in Texas – and the search for an heir to his throne – will make your whole body cringe. What a strange and wonderful gift, my liege!
hearty endorsement from me this week, when the lauded-in-the-US-and-only-available-here-after-many-many-months three-parter Ren Faire comes to Sky Documentaries .
Ren Faire focuses on the power struggle beneath George Coulam, the octogenarian self-described visionary who created the Texas Renaissance festival in 1974. The festival only runs for six weeks a year, but in that time welcomes a half-million visitors and turns over millions of dollars. There are jesters and jousts and you can eat turkey drumsticks like they did in olden times. Men in steampunk-style hats say “my lord!” to you as you walk around and chide you for wearing modern fleeces.
The chief piece-wanters are Jeff Baldwin, the festival’s head of entertainment and an almost disgustingly loyal servant of the king, and Louie Migliaccio, best described as “adult man who likes sugar-free energy drinks”. Jeff wants to maintain the park exactly as George envisioned it, and is not-so-subtly hinting that the best person to do that job is him; Louie wants to run the park as what it is, a business, and is trying to get the bank loans to buy it.
There are two notables about Ren Faire, though, that make it so worth your time: the woozy style of it, and the incredible buy-in from the documentary subjects. It’s the second notable work from film-maker Lance Oppenheim, who I am devastated to report is 28 years old, after 2020’s fantastic, and it feels like the arrival of a new and influential visual voice in documentary-making.
Documentary has been hit-and-miss the last few years – the blockbuster success of Tiger King has made every weirdo think they are one snappy soundbite away from mega-fame, and that has hurt the genre a lot. People act strangely when a camera is on them, then they soften and get used to it, and then – in the best documentaries, anyway – they quietly tell you the most devastating or deranged thing you’ve ever heard, all while watering their plants or something.
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