HOT DOCS: Running Stumbled

After years working in Hollywood, and after a 25-year absence, filmmaker John Maringouin returns as the prodigal son to his Terrytown, La., birth home.

Placed in the center of an emotional battle, he films a most intimate, frank and strange portrait about the complex relationship between the filmmaker's estranged father, the Dadaist painter Johnny Roe Jr., and Roe's self-destrucive common-law wife, Virgie Marie Pennoui.

Johnny is a New Orleans legend, known for being a career heroin user, a street-fighting pimp, and an accused murder.

He also once tried to kill his son. A lament for lost time, "Running Stumbled" is a dark, engaging hyper-real fable, shot with a Southern Soul, and always on-the-edge. It is a tale as dramatic as it is cautionary , enveloped in an atmosphere which has its main characters chasing demons and pursued by death.