Amir Bar-Lev's My Kid Could Paint That (2007) is a film that reveals more about making a documentary than about its subject, a four year old painter named Marla Olmstead whose paintings attracted attention in the bubble-icious art market of the mid-2000's. My Kid Could Paint That raises meaty issues about documentary representation of characters and events. College students in a recent journalism ethics workshop, for example, analyzed the queasy relationships between the filmmaker and the filmed. The students picked apart elements of the story that showed the filmmaker's control over shooting and editing (above, Marla's parents' body language during a heated discussion appears to show them moving apart).
