It used to be that documentaries were the medicine you took to feel better about seeing untold quantities of garbage at the movie theater. Documentaries were like Flintstone vitamins to make us feel better about seeing whatever Nicolas Cage action abomination came roaring through the cinema. Slowly, though, people like Errol Morris and Werner Herzog made it clear that documentaries could not only be interesting, but also transgressive and fascinating in a way that fiction films couldn't. This was in an era before our television became inundated with endearingly trashy reality shows; Morris and friends proved that the medium of the documentary could be culturally important, in addition to being fundamentally entertaining.

It's no surprise, then, that so many art houses are clinging to the idea of playing documentaries for an entire week - especially considering the golden age of movies that we're experiencing. Docs are no longer the equivalent of taking your medicine. Instead, with the new normal of everybody being able to create a movie, the number of ground-level docs that find stories that couldn't be re-created elsewhere, we find ourselves with a glut of compelling stories. The Olympia Film Society has assembled such a group over the course of this weekend to illustrate this fact.

Though the films featured are all non-fiction, there are stories that come fully formed in the majority of these movies. Many feature protagonists, and the ones that don't are underscored by an anger that would seem undeserved in a written film. The Hunting Ground is a film that explores the rampant and unexamined culture of rape on college campuses. The Mask You Live In similarly explores the culture-wide subjugation of women. These are important films that ask questions that most men would rather avoid.

Meanwhile, there are documentaries that shed light on parts of the world that normally don't get examined. Something Better to Come gives us a look at the largest junkyard in the world, which resides in a town just off of Moscow called the Svalka, and it's dominated by the Russian mafia and poor people just trying to get by. The final film featured in this weekend is The Grand Rescue, which recounts the 1967 rescue of a mountain climber and his friend, as well as the complicated aftermath of saving a man's life.

Getting a window into another person's life is a rare thing. To have a weekend of insights is an invaluable experience, indeed.

The festival runs from May 30, 1:30 p.m. to May 31 at 7:30 p.m.

OLYMPIA FILM SOCIETY, 206 5th Ave SE, Olympia, 360.754.6670