Hot Docs ‘06: Activist Films A Plenty; A Herzog “Cancun” Blessing and Flowing Scotch

Overall, Hot Docs screened 101 films this year, selected from 1612 submissions. This year Farnel noticed a trend towards activist films, and even created a special program for them. Says Farnel, “The ‘Join Me! How to Start a Revolution’ program was started because we were seeing a large concentration of activist work. Not just diagnostic films, but films about people working through problems.” Six films were included in the program, including the much talked about “An Unreasonable Man,” a portrait of political activist and consumer advocate Ralph Nader.

Unfortunately for General Motors, nobody told their marketing department. In a case of possibly the worst-placed advertising ever, the car manufacturer screened ads for their monstrous Cadillac Escalade SUV before every film, including the Nader doc, which recounts the story of the man whose 1965 book “Unsafe At Any Speed” slammed car companies - in particular GM - and thereby launched his career as a pundit. The irony wasn’t lost on the audience of “OilCrash” either, who boo’d rather than oohed at sight of the ads. As the film points out, the Hummer - another SUV made by GM - gets about 10 miles per gallon.

The activism bug spread into the industry side of the festival as well. Several projects were pitched at the Toronto Documentary Forum, including “The Basement Tapes” presented by EyeSteelFilms, which would explore the issue of music in the digital era through the eyes of director Brett Gaylor, an authority of the “Free Culture” movement. “The Hunt For Justice” was proposed by Dutch filmmaker Klaartje Quirijns and Eyes Wide Films, and would follow American lawyer Reed Brody as he attempts to bring to justice Hissene Habre, the vicious former dictator of Chad. Charles Darwin‘s great-great grandson Matthew Chapman pitched “The Descent of Man,” which would follow his quest to answer the question: why, in this day and age, do 54% of Americans favor the intelligent design/creationism theory over Darwin’s theory of evolution?

The Forum, or TDF as it’s referred to, is modeled after the FORUM for International Co-Financing of Docuementaries in Amsterdam. Here in North America, the TDF is the biggest pitching forum for documentary projects. Production teams have seven minutes to present their projects to a round table of international broadcasters, who then have eight minutes to comment on the projects and, hopefully, pledge financial support.

A daunting task for the producers, no doubt. Which explains why a bottle of whisky and several shot glasses were placed on the pitching table for the use of the presenting teams. At the end of the two-day event, Forum director Michaelle Mclean held the bottle high and proclaimed, “Look, almost all the Scotch is gone - it must have been a good session.”

In fact, the whole festival was good this year and it ended on an inspirational note for me. I decided not to sell my $10,000 golden ticket to the “Evening with Werner Herzog.” Instead I opted to hear the director speak about his views on the documentary form: “In a doc artistic invention can be somewhat limited . . . invention of facts can create a deeper truth, an ecstasy of truth”; On the making of his film “Fitzcarraldo”: “At first, the studio wanted to be involved in the film until they learned that I wanted to move a real boat over a real mountain, not a fake boat over a fake mountain - they got kind of frosty”; On the media: “I recently read that I had left a promising career as a NASA scientist to become a filmmaker”; And on his favorite movie these days, “The Real Cancun”:  “It’s really a film about who gets laid first - it’s that lack of pretentiousness I liked.”

But it was his closing words that left the strongest impression with me. When asked to give advice to aspiring filmmakers, he said, “If you have a clear vision, don’t be afraid. Look at all the young filmmakers who are making movies with no money at all - there are no excuses anymore.” Meaningful words from a man who really did pull a real ship over a real mountain and made a movie about it.