This was my choice a few weekends back:

I could accept a studio offer for a free flight to Los Angeles where I would be put up and fed in a Beverly Hills hotel, shown two new movies and given interviews with the film’s stars.

Or, I could go to Toronto on my own dime (and if you’ve been in Toronto lately you know that it’s going to cost you a lot more than a dime) to see some films by and starring no one you’ve ever heard of.

Of course, the only real choice was Toronto.

Hey, I like a free trip as much as the next person. But the problem with these studio junkets is that, unless you’re far ruder than I am, you pretty much feel obligated to say nice things about the films you’re shown. Given that one of the films was Poseidon (reviewed elsewhere this issue), I’m awfully glad I wasn’t in the position of having to sit across a table from the people who made it and pretend that I didn’t think it was the biggest waste of money since George Bush emptied the nation’s savings account.

If you want to see films that are entertaining, challenging and informative these days, films that are likely to be able to defend their place in the marketplace with any kind of pride, documentaries are by far your best bet. And the Canadian International Documentary Festival—Hot Docs for short—has proven itself over the last dozen years to be a showcase of some of the best nonfiction films being made.

As an indication of why I was excited about attending this years Hot Docs, here are some of the films featured in last year’s festival that have since gone on to national release: The Devil and Daniel Johnson, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Murderball, Occupation Dreamland, The Devil’s Miner, Wall, Oscar nominees Twist of Faith and Street Fight and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man.

His career reinvigorated by that hit, Herzog was feted this year with the festival’s Outstanding Achievement award, as good an excuse as any to dig out and screen some of the dozens of his less well-known documentaries. If Herzog had never made any of his fiction films, his place in cinema history would still be assured by this work, another avenue to explore his fascination with obsessives and with the struggle between man and nature.

Walking to Werner

Added to those, the Festival also had the world premier of Walking to Werner, about fledgling filmmaker Linas Phillips, who hopes to find inspiration by walking from his home in Seattle to Herzog’s house in Los Angeles—a distance of 1200 miles. The idea came from Herzog’s own legendary ambulations (he once walked from Berlin to Paris in the hope that it would save the life of a dying friend).

It sounds like a stunt, and frankly a dumb and imitative one at that. But Phillips, who shot most of the trip with a video camera he carried with him, earns our attention by deciding to continue his journey even after he learns that Herzog will be out of the country for the next few months. Coaxing conversations out of people he meets on the way, Phillips acquires a portrait of life on the fringes that is touching, unsettling, a bit giddy and a bit frightening.

Another obsessed individual was the subject of The Chances of the World Changing. In the early 1990s, Richard Ogust was dining at a restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown when he saw a brightly colored turtle in an aquarium waiting to be selected and cooked. Purchasing it and taking it home, he learned that it was an endangered species that had been poached in Asia.

By the end of the decade, Ogust’s career and bank account were in ruins as his loft apartment had become a Noah’s ark sheltering 1200 turtles, most of them also endangered species. Eric Daniel Metzgar began filming him at the point when Ogust’s plans to create an institute to shelter these animals was stymied by his neighbors voting to evict him from the building. Over the next five years, Metzgar continues to follow Ogust as he moves into a New Jersey warehouse with his collection, fighting to retain his sanity as he looks for a way to get out from under the obsession that has taken over his life. You can’t make up a story like this, just as you can’t help but be fascinated and moved by it.

An Unreasonable Man

Screenings at film festivals always begin with the necessary evil of a few trailers promoting the sponsors. For reasons known only to their marketing department, Cadillac was one of this year’s sponsors. Their trailer, featuring a new luxury sedan that is visually likened to a parade of oh-so-chic runway models, was boo’d consistently by viewers. Never was that response more appropriate than at the beginning of the screening of An Unreasonable Man, a film portrait of Ralph Nader that I fervently hope gets a chance to be seen across America.

If nothing else, this film serves to remind you (in case you’ve forgotten) that thousands of people literally owe their lives to Nader, the man who forced American auto manufacturers to live up to safety standards in the 1960s. And it lays out the work done by his various organizations in the 1970s and ’80s to fight for various other consumer rights and protections.

And yet for all the incalculable good he has done for America, Nader is reviled today as the man who “lost the election” for Al Gore in 2000. Filmmakers Henriette Mantel and Steve Skrovan give all sides to that controversy the chance to make their case, and you may or may not be persuaded that Nader was right for staying in the presidential race to the very end. But they do make one thing very clear—that Nader is wholly justified in feeling that the Democratic Party has betrayed its roots and its core principles. Let’s hope this film is seen and discussed in time to help inspire some real choice in the next presidential race.

Last year’s Hot Docs included Lost Children, about efforts to reintegrate back into society Ugandan children who had been kidnapped and pressed into the murderous service of the Lord’s Resistance Army terrorist group. The new film Uganda Rising (aka When Elephants Fight) covers the same story, though its one that can’t be repeated too often. And it improves on the earlier film by giving a broader picture of how the colonial divisions of Africa in the 19th and early 20th century continue to bear bitter fruit today, including children being forced to commit acts of such horrifying brutality that it’s hard to make your mind grasp them. But it’s a story that needs to be told, all the more so because we won’t get it from television or newspapers.