The best films are about people. Not always great or exciting people, not even people necessarily doing things. Just people — their comportment, their idiosyncrasies, the ways they deal with other people and the world. And among the usual animated trifles and short pieces in this year’s New England Film & Video Festival are some genuine explorations of the human drama.

Lawrence R. Hott’s documentary Imagining Robert: My Brother, Madness and Survival (March 25 at 7:30 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner) is both endearing and unsettling. Jay Neugeboren’s brother has been interned in one hospital or another (50 times!) for almost four decades, diagnosed with every " psychotic disorder " imaginable and " treated " with twice as many psychotropic drugs. Hott relates their torturous family story.

With his gummy grin and shaggy-dog tales, the chainsmoking Robert at first seems sympathetic. Then we learn of his first episode (he attacked Jay, strangled his father, and tried to rape his mother), witness his tantrums, and see him belittling hospital staff. The Job-like Jay has been his brother’s keeper for the 25 years since their mother, saying that " a child with mental illness . . . [is] worse than death, " divorced herself from the family. At the end, Jay and Robert watch a videotape of their mother, Alzheimer-ravaged and in a semi-coma, murmuring a memory of Robert. It’s a strange but apt dénouement.

Jane Gray’s affecting vérité film Playing House (March 28 at 6 p.m. at the MFA) offers an intimate, revealing look inside a boarding school. Descending into a maelstrom of cliques and cattiness, Gray’s camera trains itself on five teenage girls who are away from their far-flung homes for the first time. In more lighthearted moments they hex friends from home by poking pins into yearbook photos and complain about homework while singing along to Britney. Less breezy are the tearful calls home to dysfunctional families and the confrontations about cruel teasing. Such emotionally naked moments may make you feel voyeuristic, but they give Gray’s story an empathetic authenticity.

Stephen Maing’s short " Little Hearts " (March 28 at 8 p.m. at the MFA), which won NEFV’s Best of Festival, is another study of the sometimes cruel dynamics of this age group. It’s not a documentary, but it’s so unsettlingly well-acted that it might as well be. A lonely, timid squirt who’s overprotected by his Korean grandmother makes the chance acquaintance of an apparently parentless brother-sister pair. They’re greasy, they’re crude, they call each other " slut " and " faggot. " They’re wonderful.

But lazy days spent dodging balls in abandoned lots, mucking around in swamps, and tossing rocks at street signs soon lead to a confession. And a rebuke. Maing’s honest and restrained vignette, a clear-eyed evocation of what goes on when grown-ups aren’t around, is notable for the vague uneasiness that permeates its ostensibly sunny atmospherics; the actors’ spare dialogue, more adult than they know, makes for a subtle but palpable dark undercurrent.

The current is rough in Robb Moss’s The Same River Twice (March 29 at 7:30 p.m. at the MFA). Winner of the festival’s Best Independent Documentary award, it weaves together two strands of film — golden-toned Super 8 shot in the ’70s and a camcorder’s flat off-white from 20 years later — to depict the reflection and regret of a group of hippie river guides who’ve shaved their beards, donned clothes, and grown up.

In the old days, frolicking and fucking fecklessly, this coed crew hadn’t a care in the world. But as Moss’s narrative flits methodically between people and eras, it casts a hard light on how the unclad clan face the pitfalls of middle age: cancer, extramarital affairs, failure.

Cocksure Barry used to condescend to the businessmen he’d guide downriver, the ones who’d marvel at his freedom and say they’d give anything to lead his life. " You could, " he’d say. " You’ve just made a bunch of choices I haven’t made. " But when we see him now, defeated in re-election for mayor of his small town, with a mortgage and a medical history, it’s clear that he’s followed in their footsteps.

So have his friends. Only Jim has stayed the same, working the land, living in a makeshift shack. And he seems the most content. A tang of self-importance notwithstanding, this water-borne Big Chill is affecting for its brutal honesty. It starts in the ’70s, with Jim and Barry arguing on a riverbank over whether to stay put and enjoy the day or decamp just for the sake of more paddling. Jim wants to linger, Barry wants to push forward. Shown that footage, the middle-aged Barry shakes his head with a rueful grimace and says, " I change my vote. "