Hot Docs film festival opens Thursday amid burgeoning success

TORONTO (CP) - These are heady days for documentary filmmakers if the ballooning success of Hot Docs, North America's largest documentary film festival, is any indication. The Toronto festival's audience grew by 25 per cent last year, and this year's Hot Docs is promising a similar explosion, Sean Farnel, the festival's director of programming, said Tuesday.

"Based on advance sales at the box office, we're going to continue to grow at that kind of rate," Farnel said as he took a break from a busy day preparing for the Hot Docs kickoff on Thursday. "Last year was a huge single-year jump, and all indications are that we're going to have the same kind of increase again this time."

Farnel attributes the phenomenon to a simple truism: documentaries are now hip, helped along in part by the high-profile successes in recent years of films like Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9-11" and Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth."

"Documentaries have just sort of found this space in pop culture. They're seen to be very engaged politically but also moving and funny and all those things we go to the movies for as well," he said.

"People go to a doc maybe reluctantly at first and then they have great experiences. The films are really tapping into emotions but also really agitating and educating us socially and politically ... it's a vibrant form of filmmaking and it's experienced a renaissance over the last five or eight years, and audiences have gone along for that ride."

This year's festival is expected to attract as many as 60,000 moviegoers to screenings of 129 films at various downtown Toronto venues from Thursday until April 29. Twenty-two of those documentaries are from Canadian filmmakers, the largest selection of homegrown work in the 14-year history of Hot Docs.

Torontonian Jamie Kastner is among the Canadians whose films are being showcased. Kastner's "Kike Like Me," his first feature-length documentary, is one of several films at Hot Docs that's enjoying serious buzz prior to its official screening next week.

The documentary chronicles Kastner's exploration of modern-day anti-Semitism as he travels to the U.S., Israel, Britain, France, Germany and, ultimately, Poland and its notorious Auschwitz concentration camp, now a museum.

"It's a pretty controversial film, and it's a pretty provocative title, and some people may not have wanted to touch this film with a 10-foot pole," Kastner says. "But in my opinion, to their credit, Sean and Hot Docs really got this film and have really gotten right behind it. They've given it a terrific slot so I'm thrilled."

Another documentary that's already piquing interest - particularly among U.S. right-wingers - is "Manufacturing Dissent," the film from Torontonians Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine about the controversial filmmaking methods of Moore, arguably one of the world's best-known documentarians. The film screened in March at the Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Tex.

"The documentary industry in Canada has really matured, particularly over the last two or three years, and we're seeing a lot of great work," Farnel said of the strong contingent of Canadian films screening at Hot Docs this year.

Hot Docs opens Thursday with the Canadian premiere of the British documentary "In The Shadow of the Moon," David Sington's look at the select few NASA astronauts who walked on the moon. The film also screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January.

Farnel says he's equally excited about the many films that are getting their inaugural screenings at Hot Docs.

"I look forward to introducing our audiences to some of the new films like 'Billy the Kid' and 'Girls Rock' and 'The Monastery,' a fantastic film from Denmark - these are all very new films that haven't been seen, films that I hope really break out of the festival and go elsewhere as well."

Peruvian filmmaker Heddy Honigmann is being honoured this year with the festival's outstanding achievement award. Her latest documentary, "Forever," about the famed Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, is also screening at Hot Docs.

In addition to screenings, the festival is also a thriving marketplace for documentary filmmakers and the people interested in financing or buying their films. Last year, the festival attracted more than 1,800 delegates.

"People from around the world are coming here not only to screen the films, but also just to do business, to get co-productions going on new projects, to pitch their films for financing, to find films to put on their TV channels, all sorts of that stuff," Farnel said.

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Some of the 22 Canadian documentaries screening at the Hot Docs International Documentary Festival running from Thursday until April 29 in Toronto:

Chichester's Choice: Filmmaker Simonee Chichester's first film documents her personal journey to find the father who abandoned her 23 years ago.

Dark One: Darryl Miller's hallucinatory exploration of the psyche of a morphine-addicted poet.

The Suicide Tourist: John Zaritsky's documentary about a Swiss company that offers legally assisted suicide services to people from around the world.

City Idol: Arturo Perez Torres's look at regular Torontonians competing in a Canadian Idol-like contest to run in municipal elections.

Last Call at the Gladstone Hotel: A documentary exploring the gentrification of a beloved west-end Toronto landmark from filmmakers Derreck Roemer and Neil Graham.

Let's All Hate Toronto: Albert Nerenberg and Rob Spence's look at why the rest of Canada so delights in hating the country's biggest city.

On the web: www.hotdocs.ca

© The Canadian Press, 2007