DocuWeek is devoted mostly to the dark side

THE International Documentary Assn.'s DocuWeek returns to the ArcLight on Friday, and the selection of films this year -- 12 features and four shorts -- is especially strong (if mostly chilling) in the stories they tell and the issues they lay open, from the struggle to get a fair price for poverty-stricken coffee growers ("Black Gold") to the efforts of fundamentalist Christians to mold young evangelists ("Jesus Camp").

A handful of the films focuses on crimes of the past that have regrettably metastasized into personal hells of two decades or more for the films' troubled subjects. Simmering outrage is the primary emotion, for example, in "Deliver Us From Evil" and "The Trials of Darryl Hunt."

"Deliver Us," which recently won the top nonfiction prize at the Los Angeles Film Festival, is director-producer Amy Berg's hushed yet patently disturbing recounting of one pedophile Catholic priest's unchecked reign of decades in a group of parishes in Central California. If the narrative of blind-eye church power failing to protect scads of children is unsettling enough, the sight of said molester Oliver O'Grady now living quietly in Ireland (after a stint in a U.S. prison) and casually reflecting on his past is almost too bizarre for words: like being privy to a child-devouring monster out of Grimm in a kind of post-feast state of contentment.

His victims, however, are nowhere near such resolution.

"Darryl Hunt," screening for the first time in L.A., straightforwardly chronicles the ugly nexus of race prejudice, police negligence and institutional arrogance that kept an innocent black North Carolina man in jail for 19 years for the rape and murder of a white woman. In many tragic ways it's not a new story, but directors Ricki Stern and Annie Sundberg had followed Hunt's case for so long that instead of being a collection of talking heads looking back, the film achieves a rare chronological, you-are-there intimacy that makes Hunt's seemingly insurmountable fight for freedom that much more intense.

But perhaps the most haunting and sadly relevant of this subset of docs exploring festering psychic wounds is the extraordinary "Abduction: The Megumi Yokota Story," from Chris Sheridan and Patty Kim. The story it tells is a shattering mystery of violation and loss, if only because by the end, certain answers only lead to more punishing questions.