One needs only to attend a rock concert to witness just how far video cameras have evolved in recent years. Today, they are ubiquitous in any stadium, pocket-size devices held up by thousands of fans determined to catch their favorite stars in action.

As cameras have gone digital, cheap, and increasingly mobile, the notion of filming and being filmed is no longer novel — it’s the American way of life. At this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, which continues at various downtown theaters through May 6, a new crop of intimate, in-your-face films is raising the bar for what some would deem the prototypical, behind-the-scenes documentary.

One of the most striking examples in the Tribeca catalog is “An Omar Broadway Film” (screening April 26, 27, 30; May 1, 3), a provocative documentary featuring footage taken by an imprisoned man named Omar Broadway while he was an inmate at Northern State Prison, in Newark, N.J. Broadway’s co-director, Douglas Tirola, recently recalled the phone conversation he had two years ago with the strange prisoner who alerted him to this raw, prison video.

“I had no idea what I was getting into, but he told me, ‘You have to get down here. This is something you’ve never seen before.’ When I finally got there, I was just blown away. It wasn’t just that here was footage from within a prison, but it was also the way that the footage was portrayed, as a first-person account of the prison experience.”

What Mr. Tirola saw that day were raw, stark recordings of the extreme and abusive treatment of inmates housed in the prison’s maximum-security gang unit, filmed through the window of a prison cell and later smuggled out to Broadway’s mother, who then hoped to use the footage as evidence of her son’s mistreatment. Two years later, “An Omar Broadway Film” — which supplements Broadway’s video clips with detailed stories of the cops who work at these prisons, testimonies from family members of the incarcerated, and accounts of the violence that has stained the city of Newark — is an intense immersion in the life of an inmate.

“It’s not just the brutality that is shocking, but by having the camera here inside the cell, right in their face, some of the most interesting stuff is more the day-to-day footage,” Mr. Tirola said. “You even see some of the internal conflicts — the way that prisoners protest as a means of airing their complaints, but how the guards see that as an aggressive action and put on their riot gear. And then there’s the loneliness. These cells are only built for one person, but would you be willing to trade that loneliness for a roommate, even if it means less space for yourself? These men are locked in these rooms for 23 hours a day for years, and Omar’s footage puts you right there.”

What “An Omar Broadway Film” does for life in prison, John Walter’s “Theater of War” (April 27, 28, 30; May 2, 3) does for life in the theater. Simply substitute the Public Theater for a maximum-security lockdown. In 2006, the Public chose to organize a series of outdoor performances of Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage,” the classic, unabashedly cynical tale of war and exploitation.

Not only a behind-the-curtain look at a much-hyped production (which drafted the playwright Tony Kushner to pen a fresh translation of Mr. Brecht’s material), Mr. Walter’s film taps into the ebbs and flows of the creative process, capturing a rare glimpse of actors Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline as they craft their characters, and talking to an array of experts outside the production as to how Brecht’s text has evolved through the generations. For any fan of the theater, the intimacy of “Theater of War” will mesmerize as it explores this “Mother Courage” not as an isolated production but as a sprawling, collaborative effort among actor, director, author, and interpreter, as well as the past and present.

Like “Theater of War” and “Omar Broadway,” “The Zen of Bobby V” (April 27; May 1, 3) is a testament to intimacy through immersion. Andrew Jenks was a student at New York University when he first read an article about Bobby Valentine, the storied, one-time manager of the New York Mets, who manages in Japan. Mr. Jenks, the 22-year-old director of the recent Showtime documentary “Andrew Jenks, Room 335,” was amazed by the scene and a spectacle surrounding Mr. Valentine’s stewardship of the Chiba Lotte Marines.

After Convincing ESPN to sign on to the project and talking NYU into giving him internship credit for a prolonged leave of absence, Mr. Jenks teamed with friends Jonah Quickmire Pettigrew and Andrew Muscat, and flew halfway around the world to spend seven months by Mr. Valentine’s side.

“When we pitched ESPN, we told them that we’d have to be there for at least that long,” Mr. Jenks said. “So much of Japan’s culture is about process, about going through the proper channels, and we were worried that if we only went for a couple months, we wouldn’t be able to really get the truth from people about what’s going on under Bobby’s leadership.”

In part a chronicling of a single baseball season and a revealing glimpse of the Japanese style of baseball and of Mr. Valentine’s fascinating rise to Japanese celebrity (“He taught us how to walk fast everywhere we went, or else he would be mobbed,” Mr. Jenks said), “The Zen of Bobby V” also witnesses the way the former Mets manager must fight to prevent his best players from defecting to Major League Baseball, the league that employed him, as a player and later a manager, for more than 30 years. The loss of talent, he believes, is eroding the caliber of the Japanese pastime as it enriches that of his homeland.

“You could tell it was different from day one,” Mr. Jenks said. “I think baseball in Japan is played in many ways the way he envisions the game — players showing up early, practicing on their days off, concerned about the fundamentals. Every time he passes a schoolyard, kids are playing. Even the fans stay after the game and practice their cheers for the next game. This is more than just a night out at the ballpark for these people — there’s a reason Bobby works from 6 to midnight every day.”

Sunday night will be the first public screening of the film, and Mr. Jenks has been tweaking the final product in anticipation of its big splash. Come Monday, he said, he’ll start thinking about finally getting that college diploma.

ssnyder@nysun.com