Judging by the number of people ‘chasing the O’ at the Hot Docs wrap gala 2000, those docmakers are way too sexy for their films.

And way too sexy for the heavy metal, o-shaped sculpture the winners took home May 7 following an evening of dockers-only noshing, schmoozing and profuse thanking at the Winter Garden Theatre in Toront-o.

The circular impression jokes got started after emcee Albert Schultz picked up on the ‘Chasing the O’ segment title of one of the nominated programs (from a series entitled The Sex Files). Sex may have lost out in the best series category, but it stole the show from its O-ring winning counterparts, just the same.

The gala wrapped a high-energy week of screenings, the ringing debut of the Toronto Documentary Forum pitching sessions, and a wide variety of lively panels. Hot Doc Awards honored 22 winners – including three ties – and two honorable mentions in 19 categories, and recognized the unmatched work of renowned documentary filmmakers D.A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Among the biggest winners was The Holier It Gets, directed by Jennifer Baichwal and produced by Baichwal and Nick de Pencier, which won for best independent Canadian documentary of the festival and also walked off with the award in the best cultural category. Zyklon Portrait, directed and produced by Elida Schogt, which garnered an honorable mention in the best Canadian independent documentary of the festival category, also won in the best short and best editing categories. Zyklon Portrait also tied for the Vision tv Humanitarian Award with Village of Widows directed by Peter Blow and produced by Blow and Gil Gauvreau.

Avante le jour directed by Lucie Lambert and produced by Sylvain L’Esperance won for best feature and Pierre Houle won for best direction for his work on Riopelle, sans titre, collage, 1999 .

Winner of the best science/technology/environment category was Pandemic: Case of the Killer Flu from director Elliott Halpern, and produced by Halpern, Simcha Jacobovici and Garfield Kennedy. Best political category was taken by Images of a Dictatorship directed by Patricio Henriquez, produced by Henriquez, Raymonde Provencher and Robert Cornellier.

Other winners included Laugh in the Dark, directed and produced by Justine Pimlott in the best social issue category; Unwanted Soldiers directed by Jari Osborne and produced by Louise Lore and Karen King for the History category; Turning Points of History from series producers Frank Savoie, Laszlo Barna and Alan Mendelsohn for best series; The Life & Times of Dr. Henry Morgentaler, directed by Audrey Mehler and produced by Mehler and David Paperny in the best biography slot and A la recherche de Louis Archambault directed and produced by Werner Volkmer for best arts.

Notable winners from the night also included the tie for the Critics’ Prize for best international documentary between Godard a la tele (Godard on tv), directed by Michel Royer and produced by Christiane Graziani and Long Night’s Journey Into Day, directed by Deborah Hoffmann and Frances Reid and produced by Frances Reid.

Box-office boom

The festival has once again expanded, with box office figures for this year coming in at just over 15,000, compared to 8,000 in attendance last year, according to executive director of the festival Chris McDonald.

Festival managing director Karen Tisch, says: ‘Hot Docs was an overwhelming success and the tdf went off smoothly. The feedback on the forum has been very strong. Producers and commissioning editors both feel it could become the other [destination to secure financing] after Amsterdam.

‘It’s important to remember,’ Tisch continues, ‘that Hot Docs started as a conference for industry professionals and less of a public event and then last year was the first year we really pushed [general public attendance]. So for us it’s gratifying.’

Response to the inaugural Toronto Documentary Forum, a pitching session attended by commissioning editors from all over the world, has been overwhelmingly favorable from both participants and organizers.

‘We have a smashing success on our hands but obviously a measure of success will be how much business is done,’ Michaelle McLean, director of the tdf, says of the event. With that in mind, three and eight month polls are already being planned to gauge the success of the meeting in dollar terms. ‘The second measure of success is how much observers got out of it in terms of market intelligence,’ McLean adds. ‘I found the people I was chatting to at the breaks said, ‘It’s so great to hear the whys and why nots,’ because it’s one thing to hear one person’s programming brief but it’s another to hear them say in the moment what appeals to them. Of course programming briefs change, so they need to keep up-to-date and [at the forum] they get it from the horse’s mouth.’

The final measure of success for the event, McLean says, is ‘what it does for the festival in terms of being a destination – and I think it raised our profile hugely and the buzz has been really excellent.’

Yolanda Klarenbeek, director of the Forum for International Co-Financing of Documentaries, star draw at the Amsterdam documentary festival and the event the tdf was modeled after ‘from regulations to table settings,’ was in town for the festival. ‘It went very well, I’m very positive about it,’ she commented.

Forum Feedback

Hot Docs executive director Chris McDonald says the reputation of Amsterdam’s forum rubbed off on Toronto’s event. ‘The [filmmakers] who had gone to Amsterdam before had confidence in the format and we were able to persuade a lot of North Americans not familiar with the forum that it was worthwhile. They were impressed. It went remarkably well. There were strong story pitches and the commissioning editors were pleased. Everyone I’ve spoken to plans on returning.’ At the same time, he concedes, ‘Some of these deals could take a long time. [The forum is] very much about meeting and it’s the producer’s job to follow up.’

Attending commissioning editor Bjorn Arvis from fvt in Sweden was cautious in his assessment, saying that although the standard of submission was ‘good,’ the forum was likely to exert its influence ‘in the long run, not in the immediate situation’ as a ‘way to connect people to each other. But it’s a longer process than just having a meeting.’

Likewise, Elizabeth Cullen, director, program acquisition of Oxygen Media who called the forum ‘very interesting and informative,’ and ‘a great place for broadcasters to know what’s going on in the wider world’ was non-committal about acquisitions arising from the event.

History Channel’s vice-president of programming, Sydney Suissa, who says he saw ‘lots of potential programming for History,’ at the tdf, has made two specific moves based on Forum pitches: a formal prebuy offer for British/French coprod War Surgeons and a ‘matchmaker’ manoeuvre on behalf of The Last Princess, about the sister of the last Russian czar, who lived the last years of her life in Canada. ‘I was able to introduce [the filmmaker] to Barbara Barde. If she can team up with a Canadian producer and work out a coproduction arrangement, we’ll license it. It would be so wonderful to see if it could be coproduced because the Canadian angle is so strong.’

Pitching pundits

Moderator Norm Bolen, head of programming for History Channel and the Life Network, spoke of the expertise gathered in the room.

‘It ended up being like a Master Class [for producers] on how to do a pitch, and a Master Class for the commissioning editors on how to evaluate a program. [The forum’s attendees] were a very representative cross-section of high-end commissioning editors. It’s a very small club and we had the most senior members of the club there. It’s very unusual to get them together. The producers were exposed to them for two days and got to see what can be done with pitches. I would say I haven’t seen anything else as concentrated and high-level as this before.’

Bolen, who has been invited to Amsterdam as a moderator as a result of his work at the tdf says the invited commissioning editors force the level of debate upward. ‘When you’re dealing with commissioning editors you’re dealing with very high-level intellects and you need to ratchet up your ideas and this group of commissioning editors is interested in programs of consequence. This is a very rare, high-level event for Toronto. It doesn’t happen every day.’

Josette Normandeau of Ideas Com International, who originally attended as an observer, became one of the festival’s three randomly selected Our Mountie’s Hat participants and used her impromptu 15-minute pitch slot – for which she had 15 minutes to prepare – to promote Way of the Warrior, a martial arts series she has been interested in making for two years. Having initially gone ‘to see what broadcasters and commissioning editors had to say,’ Normandeau has had interest from a&e, tlc, National Geographic, Discovery International and offshore channels as a direct result of her presentation.

Less enthused about his reception was producer Roger Weisberg of Public Policy Productions, whose property The Mainstream follows the Mississippi into the heart of America. While he says it ‘was useful to get my face in front of so many commissioning editors,’ he thinks the nature of his project may seem too u.s.-centred for such an international audience.

‘This was also my experience in the forum in Amsterdam [in 1998 when he pitched his similar American travelogue project Road Scholar]. It’s almost deja vu. The buyers [at the tdf] were the buyers I was pitching a year earlier for a different project. I like getting to know these folks. I think [the tdf pitch] will remind them of the project when it crosses their desks.’

Despite ‘three or four,’ expressions of interest from the forum, Weisberg feels that it will take a finished film to convert that interest to deals: ‘I look forward to saying ‘I told you so”.

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