by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The documentary is a form fraught with danger. Doing double-duty as fact and cinema, it can often sell out the former to the latter; faced with the necessity of pleasing an audience as well as informing it, it can take shortcuts, highlight sensationalistic details, and succumb to an artificial pace in the attempt to boil down its information and create exciting drama. An innocent audience can be moved without truly getting a grasp on the film's subject, and can leave with the impression of having learned something while having merely scratched the surface. But when a documentary does its job (that is, when it teaches us about the world in which we live with eloquence and urgency), it justifies the form and makes you forget about all of its less noble brethren.
The game of deciding which is which is what's on offer at the 2003 Hot Docs documentary festival. Now in its tenth year, it offers a vast smorgasbord of films from 30 countries–122 in all (21 of which are world premieres), the largest selection in the festival's history. Aside from its de rigueur Canadian spotlight, showcasing 42 of our country's finest, it features national spotlights on both the UK and Taiwan. Canadian Shelley Saywell, director of such films as Fire and Water and Kim's Story: The Road from Vietnam, receives a six-film spotlight, while the sidebar "RealKids, RealTeens" offers documentaries of interest to children and youth. New this year: a series of free late-night films at the venerable Bloor cinema.
But the biggest name at the festival will undoubtedly be Nick Broomfield, the controversial mind behind such films as Biggie and Tupac and Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer. He's being presented with the festival's Outstanding Achievement Award, and so the fest will feature four of his films in a mini-retrospective. Broomfield's insistence on placing himself in front of the camera has raised a few eyebrows, but there's no denying that he's one of the most prominent documentarians of our time and thus a figure to contend with. He'll host one of this year's industry master classes in addition to attending his films' screenings.
