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Jason Anderson
Movie Entertainment
April 2010
Often truth is stranger than fiction – it can also be more inspiring, more astonishing and more downright dramatic, too.
Of course, it’s the goal of every documentary maker to find the stories that yield these results. And more and more viewers hope they do. Indeed, the audience for documentaries has expanded greatly over the last 10 years.
The huge success of An Inconvenient Truth and Fahrenheit 9/11 is a big reason for that shift, but perhaps more important is the more accessible (and more exciting) variety of docs of all stripes. Gone are the days of stiff, dry fare familiar from classrooms and public TV. Recent hits like Anvil! The Story of Anvil, The Cove, and Food, Inc. represent a bolder breed of non-fiction film.
This month, truth-seeking moviegoers will converge in Toronto for the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, which runs from April 29 to May 9. Now in its 17th year, Hot Docs has become North America’s biggest documentary fest, attracting 122,000 viewers last year. Programming director Sean Farnel and his team have seen attendance double in the last five years, which is one more indication of the doc’s crossover success. Even so, some newcomers may initially be reluctant about diving into the doc world. “They think it’s going to be like going to school,” Farnel says. “But once they come, they get hooked on the experience.”
Reflecting the huge diversity of nonfiction films being created, Hot Docs’ slate includes movies on the environment, human rights, science, history, sports, the arts and many more topics. Indeed, the sheer abundance of docs can be overwhelming. Farnel cites the proliferation of easily affordable digital filmmaking tools as one reason there are so many new documentarians on the job. Their handiwork might also have elements more common to popular blockbusters than any non-fiction antecedents.
Yet what the newcomers have in common with their forebears is a drive to bring wider notice to vital stories and issues that might otherwise be overlooked. “Engaged filmmaking has never been more prolific than over the past decade,” Farnel says.
A talent for stirring up controversy has made an icon out of the most popular example of this new wave of doc-makers, the one and only Michael Moore. He had the rare privilege of becoming a subject himself in such unflattering portraits as the Canadian doc Manufacturing Dissent and Michael Moore Hates America. But as Farnel says: “There are literally thousands of other filmmakers making tough, thoughtful, provocative non-fiction films at a time when they’re needed more than ever.”
And though they might get the attention from editorialists and bloggers, activist minded docs constitute just one subcategory in an ever-expanding field. For viewers who may be wondering where to start and what to see, we present this primer on docs of all sorts from the past few years. With great movies like these, it’s no wonder that viewers are getting a taste for the real thing.
MUST SEE DOCS
CRAZY COMPETITIONS
Doc-makers know that the thrills of victory and the agonies of defeat are present in even the unlikeliest contests.
Thus does a national spelling bee yield several Super Bowls’ worth of excitement in Spellbound. Tensions run just as high with the young dancers in Mad Hot Ballroom, the crossword maniacs in Wordplay and the ferocious wheelchair athletes in Murderball.
THE FAMOUS AND THE INFAMOUS
Docs can also offer revealing views of public figures we thought we knew. Valentino: The Last Emperor, about the legendary Italian designer, and The September Issue, about Vogue editor Anna Wintour, dissect the vanities of the fashion world. Frank and hilarious, Comedian charts Jerry Seinfeld’s road back to the stand-up stage. Even more surprising is the sight of macho hard-rockers getting weepy in Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, though the stories of music’s cult heroes in Anvil! The Story of Anvil and The Devil and Daniel Johnston prove just as compelling.
CONSCIOUSNESS RAISERS
Food, Inc. and The End of the Line force eaters to ponder what’s on their forks. I.O.U.S.A. and Capitalism: A Love Story point to reasons for our economic woes, while Crude, Collapse and Who Killed the Electric Car? depict aspects and consequences of fossil-fuel addiction. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have provided meaty material for filmmakers, judging by the likes of Standard Operating Procedure, Taxi to the Dark Side and No End in Sight. But it’s not all bad news: Darfur Now and The Cove celebrate people who are making a difference in the very worst of circumstances.
FANTASTIC VOYAGES
Journeys along China’s longest river and alongside photographer Edward Burtynsky yield insights about the rapidly changing superpower in the Canadian hits Up the Yangtze and Manufactured Landscapes. And with Encounters at the End of the World, Antarctica gets the tour guide it deserves in the inimitable Werner Herzog.
AMAZING STORIES
Whether it’s the incredible tale of a tightrope walk between the Twin Towers in Man on Wire, a mountain expedition gone seriously wrong in Touching the Void or a little girl’s experience of the Holocaust in Inside Hana’s Suitcase, non-fiction films offer everything a viewer demands from any work. In the words of Sean Farnel, “Great docs make an emotional connection, just as great movies do.”