Toronto’s Hot Docs screens world documentaries to record-breaking audiences

My brain hurts.

It’s a good hurt, like the kind your body gets after a brisk workout. I’ve just come back from the Canadian International Documentary Festival—Hot Docs for short—which as always presented a mind-expanding selection of real-life films from around the world.

(My feet hurt too. For the last weekend of the festival the Toronto Transit Commission was on strike, putting a halt to those wonderfully convenient subways and streetcars that ordinarily make it feasible for me to stay at a hotel a mile and a half away from the screening locations. Add to that the fact that the venues themselves are somewhat spread out and I ended up sleeping through one of the films I most wanted to see. Taxis? Even if you can afford them, good luck finding one downtown in a city of five million on a spring weekend during a transit strike.)

The pain to my brain comes not just from being exposed to a lot of new perspectives on the world but from differing opinions that seem equally plausible and powerful. How to reconcile, for instance, two documentaries like My Life Inside and Dear Zacherly? In the first, a young Mexican woman, an illegal immigrant to the United States, is accused of the murder of a child she was babysitting. Though the case against her seems weak, her two children are taken away from her and her husband and placed into foster care. In the second, the parents of a murdered doctor fight for custody of their grandchild, born in prison to the woman accused of the murder—their daughter-in-law.

Both are heart-wrenching stories that cry out for injustice to be righted. Yet looking at both together makes you realize that they represent extreme sides of a difficult issue that could never be adequately covered by a single law. You come away mostly hoping that the people charged with carrying out justice have an ability to look at every side of a question.

Perhaps mindful of the volume of documentaries about the US invasion of Iraq and associated issues that have come out in recent years (and their minimal impact at the box office), this year’s Hot Docs was thinner than usual on political documentaries. The major exception was Standard Operating Procedure, in which Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War) turns his camera on some of the soldiers seen in those shocking photos from Abu Ghraib prison. Morris’s goal is to look beyond the edges of those pictures to find their context: do they tell the whole story, or did the service men and women seen in them take the fall for higher-ups who ordered their behavior? While the subject has been examined in other relatively high-profile films, including Ghosts of Abu Ghraib and the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, Morris’ name and his polished reenactments that accompany the testimonies may bring his film to a wider audience (it should be in Buffalo within a few weeks).

Already the largest documentary festival in North America, Hot Docs continues to expand by leaps and bounds, with attendance up this year by a whopping 25 percent. I only saw 27 of the 172 films screened, and somehow managed to miss eight of the top 10 films as voted by the audiences. So while I hesitate to make broad generalizations about the overall festival, I can still say that the ratio of quality to crap of the films I saw was pretty respectable.

Speaking of crap, the film that probably had the biggest impact on me was Garbage! The Revolution Starts at Home. Its thesis, that those of us in the western world produce a lot more refuse than we know what to do with, is hardly new, but it found a novel way to present it. Toronto filmmaker Andrew Nisker somehow persuaded some friends—a city-dwelling family of five—to keep all the garbage they generated for a period of three months. Along the way, he traces the global consequences of such minute decisions as your computer on “sleep” and running the water while you brush your teeth. Let’s face it, we all need to be prodded into being better about environmental issues, and this entertaining but sobering movie has put me back on guard.

Man’s relationship to his environment was also the topic of the astonishingly beautiful Manufactured Landscapes. Following the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky, who produces large-scale photographs of industrial sites and waste dumps, director Jennifer Baichwal extends his work by giving it time and motion while maintaining his meditative nature. Though not intended to have a political nature, it’s impossible to come away from its depictions of Chinese factories, the mammoth Three Gorges Dam project (which has displaced 13 cities and 1.3 million people), and the swollen city of Shanghai without shuddering at the example China is setting for other countries looking to industrialize. Its already available on DVD in the US, though watching it on a small screen couldn’t do it justice. (It was presented at Hot Docs as part of a tribute to Baichwal, whose The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia was another of the fests most memorable movies.)

Individuals overcoming personal traumas and disabilities, always a subject of fascination, were well represented. S&M: Short and Male promised to be a lighthearted look at what five-foot-three-inch filmmaker Howard Goldberg describes as a culture of “heightism,” in which men of smaller than average stature around the world are discriminated against. (The exception: France, whose current leader Nicolas Sarkozy is 1.5 inches shorter than Napoleon.) While Goldberg’s documentary is heavy on humor, he uses it to leaven so many surprising statistics that by the time he gets to weightier items like surgical procedures to make people taller he has more than gained your sympathy.

When Italy’s right-wing government was replaced by a center-left coalition several years ago, it was widely expected that the country’s marriage laws would be expanded to include rights for unmarried and gay couples. The process by which those hopes were dashed is documented in Suddenly Last Winter, a film that had the dubious virtue of pointing out that the US is not the only civilized country where this elementary point of contract law has been squashed by religious nutcases. (It’s astonishing how they use the same idiotic arguments, albeit in Italian.)

More uplifting was Life Support Music, the story of Manhattan musician Jason Crigler, who suffered a debilitating brain hemorrhage during a performance in 2004. Although doctors predicted he would never walk or be able to live outside an assisted care facility, he made an almost total recovery with the help of his family, who refused to let him slip into a semi-vegetative state. Another musician—of a sort—fares less well in Song Sung Blue, the story of a Milwaukee couple who performed a tribute act to Neil Diamond and Patsy Cline. Their brief moment in the sun is followed by a seemingly endless stream of tragedies in which they are weirdly willing to let director Greg Kohs capture them at what I can only hope is their absolute worst. It’s compelling stuff, but so is reality TV, at least to a point.