Reel life

Q: Scanning the documentary programming this year, two themes seem to emerge: politics and music.

A: I would say a third would be a strong representation of portraiture and biography. Films like Obscene, about publisher Barney Rossit, who fought important First Amendment battles; or Glass, a portrait of Philip Glass by Scott Hicks, the director of Shine; or Trumbo, about the blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo. And something I’d also throw into that category is Terror’s Advocate by Barbet Schroeder [about lawyer Jacques Vergès, whose clients have included Klaus Barbie and Slobodan Milosevic]. And to pick up on what you said about politics, one of the films playing in our Special Presentations category, Jonathan Demme’s film about Jimmy Carter, Man From Plains, would also qualify as remarkable portraiture work. The bulk of that film was only shot last December, when Carter was on his controversial book tour for Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. 

Q: How much are these themes a reflection of the films being made right now, and how much do they reflect your mandate or interests as a programmer?

A: The themes are something that we recognize after the list is put together, when we step back to take a look at it. I don’t go in with a predetermined idea that we should look at, say, portraiture this year. My selection is based on what are the films that stand out among the hundreds that I watch. It just so happens that this is where the needle is falling on the dial of the zeitgeist right now.

Q: In recent years, a lot of major directors have been turning, or returning, to documentary filmmaking. This year you have Werner (Grizzly Man) Herzog’s new Antarctica documentary, Encounters at the End of the World, as well as the Schroeder and  Demme films you’ve mentioned.

A: It’s pretty extraordinary. And you can include in that list Scott Hicks and Julian Schnabel, who has a documentary of a Lou Reed concert [Lou Reed’s Berlin]. And even more signifying this year, I think, is Phil Donahue, the venerable talk-show host [with his film Body of War]. Here’s a guy who has access to all kinds of media and yet he’s choosing to make a documentary. I think it reflects the way documentary has become a real centre point in our culture.

Q: Why do you think feature-film directors are being attracted to the non-fiction form?

A: I think that there’s a certain creative freedom that they can enjoy with documentaries. They don’t have to work with the same trappings of budget and crew, and be subject to the whims of actors and big producers. Scott Hicks, for instance, on the Philip Glass documentary, just picked up the camera and started shooting it himself, before anyone gave him money to make the film. He told me it was tremendously liberating to be able to do that. Ninety per cent of the film is shot by him — in the end, he never did hire anyone else [to shoot it].

Q: Michael Moore, the poster boy for the documentary resurgence and a TIFF favourite, is also back this year with a new film, Captain Mike Across America. What can you tell us about it?

A: It’s a very different film than what people have seen from Moore lately. It’s made with a fraction of the budget of films like Sicko and Bowling for Columbine. It’s more like a scrappy concert-tour film of his campaign in 2004 [during the U.S. presidential elections], where he toured an astonishing number of college campuses in a short period of time trying to tap into the emerging youth vote.

Q: This year you’ve opened the Doc Talks series to the public. Why did you decide to do that?

A: Documentaries are the films that are consistently the most talked about, the ones that, a week later, you’re still debating, so we have tried to create opportunities at the festival to take those conversations further. [For example there’s] a panel called Covering War, where filmmaker Michael Tucker, who was here last year with The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair, is going to be presenting a preview clip of his new work in progress called The Bullet-Proof Salesman, about an armoured-car salesman in Iraq. He’ll be joined by Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro, the co-directors of the film Body of War, about an American soldier who was injured in Iraq, and came back and became a vehement antiwar activist.

[As well as the four Doc Talks panels], in our Mavericks program, we’ll have a discussion with Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter in conjunction with the film Man From Plains, which will be the first time we’ve ever had a former U.S. president visit the festival. And following in the footsteps of our Sicko sneak preview last year, we’re going to have Larry Charles, the director of Borat, sneak-previewing his new film with Bill Maher, Religulous, a film about religion. Charles and Maher are going to be in conversation about that and they’ll show some clips.

Q: If you were able to direct the distributors to some of the less high-profile documentaries this year that you think deserve a wide audience, are there any in particular you’d recommend?

A: Absolutely. I’d say Operation Filmmaker by Nina Davenport is an incredible stranger-than-fiction type story. It’s almost too complicated to explain, but it involves the actor Liev Schreiber trying to help an Iraqi film student. It’s a classic case of an American with the best intentions trying to help an Iraqi, and nothing goes as planned and no one has an exit strategy. It’s a remarkable metaphor for larger machinations. The film The Dictator Hunter, about the Human Rights Watch lawyer Reed Brody trying to bring to justice the former dictator of Chad, is a remarkably well-observed film that plays out almost like a piece of drama, except that Brody’s dialogue is better than anything that Hollywood writes.

Q: How many documentaries were submitted to TIFF this year?

A: I haven’t done a precise count, but last year there were about 500, so that’s a rough idea of how much we’ve looked through [this year]. I also spend my year going to festivals like IDFA in Amsterdam, and Berlin and Cannes. And my colleagues, our staff of programmers, are putting their feet in almost every continent — Asia, Africa, the Indian subcontinent, South America — looking for the latest from those territories.

Q: How much Canadian content is on your roster this year?

A: This year in the Real to Reel section we have three very substantial Canadian documentaries: Peter Raymont’s A Promise to the Dead, about the Chilean author Ariel Dorfman; a film called The Wild Horse Redemption, about prisoners who are taught to tame mustang horses; and Heavy Metal in Baghdad, which is made by the same team behind Montreal’s VICE magazine. And this year’s Canadian Retrospective at the festival [focuses on] the filmmaker Michel Brault, who has gone back and forth between documentary and fiction.

Q: With all these big-name directors making docs now, what are the chances of a documentary submitted by an unknown filmmaker getting into the festival?

A: Good question. The film Obscene is by two first-time filmmakers. Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor come from a background in publishing and I have to say, when I got the film, I expected to enjoy it because I was interested in the subject matter, but I also somewhat dreaded putting it in the DVD player. I see lots of films that are labours of love, like this one, and normally they don’t match the quality that we’re looking for. I was thrilled to discover very quickly while watching this film that I was in the hands of people who really understood what they were doing. As someone who watches a few hundred films in a short period of time, there’s such a sense of excitement when you see something that takes you by surprise.