Zachary Levy's Strongman is a startlingly, emotionally intimate study of the relationship between Stanley "Stanless Steel" Pleskun, who bills himself as the strongest man in the world and proves it by traveling the auto-show circuit lifting pickups with his legs and bending pennies, and his girlfriend, Barb, who really wants to understand him and his ambitions, but doesn't always succeed.

Equal parts character study, rumination on artistic purity and Greek tragedy, Strongman, which Levy (left, during the post-film Q&A) worked on for nine years, won the Grand Jury Prize as Best Documentary at this year's Slamdance Film Festival. It was partly financed through its director's 2003 creation of "Bush Cards," playing cards featuring members of the George W. Bush administration.

Did you feel, at times, that you were imposing somehow, or that you were not where you should have been? Watching this film, it must have been very uncomfortable for you at times.

No. I came to make a film. I was there, and I wasn't going to go away. I was sort-of staking my place in their world. I don't think there were too many times when I felt I was witnessing something that I shouldn't have been, or that I was exploiting them or their situation in any way.

There were hard things for me to film. I empathized with Stan a lot in different places, so if I saw him going through something, it was not fun necessarily to watch it through the lens, or to watch him in pain through the lens. But at the same time, I'm there to make a film, to sdtay in it and to keep doing it.

Of course, the age-old question in cinema verite, going back to the Maysles, is how much does your presence influence events? How do you deal with that?

I don't think it does. Having been there, and having done a film that is very much of that tradition of 1960s-style verite, I don't think it does. I think what happens with the camera is that it amplifies what's already there. It definitely has an effect, but I think it's basically just to turn up the volume in a way, so that things that are latent on the surface begin to happen. It's not changing it, per se, it's just pushing some of these things to be seen.

What happens to Strongman next?

Ideally, my hope would be that it gets theatrical distribution, to release it like it was a traditional 1975 movie, where you have a theatrical release, and then television, and then a DVD, and then all these other things. Worst-case, I figure if I can't get an outsider or a big company behind it, I'll figure out a way to do it myself.

Photo by Chris Kaltenbach