Sheffield, Eng.: Few in this South Yorkshire city would doubt the power of the moving image to obliterate obscurity. The home of The Full Monty – which opens with the cliched, boosterish and scratchy stereotypical industrial promotion documentary – Sheffield is known, now, for unemployment and naked men. Is that true? Is that fair?

The recently concluded 5th Sheffield International Documentary Festival grappled with – one might even say wrung its collective hands over – notions of truth and fairness in British documentary filmmaking.

Debate about documentary ethics and practice dominated the festival, as recent hoaxes and alleged acts of fakery in docs here have become front-page fodder.

As documentary has become a more powerful ratings-getter, docs have come under greater scrutiny for their accuracy from newspaper journalists (perhaps, in part, because, as one documaker here suggested, more of the investigative breakthroughs in British public life in the past decade have come from tv, not print).

One documentary, entitled Hoax, included recreations of recreations, done to illustrate the, uh, original recreations done by a German filmmaker. . . who just completed two years in prison for his ersatz efforts.

Perhaps it was especially appropriate that the sport with the least perceived veracity of all – professional wrestling – opened the festival, as Paul Jay of Toronto’s Highroad Productions brought his feature-length wrestling epic Hit Man Hart to town. Already a hit itself with key international broadcasters, the film drew an enthusiastic crowd at Sheffield, as well as a reporter from Powerslam magazine.

This was the second time in three years a Canadian film opened the festival (the National Film Board’s Project Grizzly had the honor in 1996).

1998 being the 100th anniversary of his birth, the ghost of John Grierson – father of the British documentary movement, creator of the nfb, and blueprint-maker for such Empire-devised entities as the Gold Coast Film Unit in Africa – lurked throughout the proceedings, held in a former auto showroom, now a modern four-screen cinema complex.

With the five terrestrial channels still holding on to almost 90% of the viewing audience, it’s inevitable that primetime documentary occupies a large share of mind amongst press and public. It’s unlikely that in Canada a participant in a documentary could, with any rational hope of a response, place an ad in a trade paper announcing her availability for other tv work. But the docusoap genre in the u.k. has made stars out of driving school students and cruise ship social directors.

The Sheffield Festival was created in the wake of the 1990 Broadcasting Act, which introduced market principles to the British tv system and shook up the old order, now about to be further splintered by the introduction of scores of digital channels.

Back then, many feared the new commercial tv landscape would have no room for ‘factual’ programs. Many titter at that thought now, but others fret, seeing that there is room mostly for docutainment.

National tastes still form barriers – or require adjustments to programs, meaning multiple versions, and not just cut-downs – for documakers.

Simplistically speaking, the Brits might use a presenter, namely an authoritative academic or journalist. Americans will take the same, say, science program, strip out the presenter, and put the information in a narrator’s voice over shots of volcanoes, in order to get quickly to the core of the program and hold on to the audience in those first crucial minutes. And the French and Germans won’t allow a second of silence to pass before inserting commentary.

For Andre Singer, a marriage broker for the European Documentary Network and a producer at London-based Cafe Productions, there is, perhaps, no such animal as a documentary ‘coproduction,’ only cofinanced projects with a single producer.

‘It’s mayhem if you really have more than one producer,’ says Singer.

The best route to creative collaboration is to find, preferably over much vodka, a ‘soul partner.’

Marion Bowman, managing editor, BBC Entertainment and a board member of the festival, said, ‘Never before has the ideological power of documentary films been so vigorously appropriated.’ She cites as the source of its power ‘documentary’s claims and beliefs about reality.’

For many, such claims are rooted in Grierson’s definition of the documentary as being the ‘creative treatment of actuality.’ In these uncertain times, the legitimacy of that definition was called into question.

In the discussion ‘Let He Who is Without Sin. . . ,’ filmmakers acknowledged the routine, if little known by the public, manipulation and massaging of images, chronologies and words to tell a documentary story.

At one end of the continuum is the use (as Martin Smith, producer of the massive Cold War series, suggested) of a 1934 photo of Stalin when you are quoting a 1933 Stalin speech.

At the other, some felt, is doing, as the filmmakers of the drug expose The Connection did, filming a Colombian drug ‘mule’ (one who ingests illegal drugs for smuggling) flying to London.

One of the problems raised regarding The Connection is that what seems to be one uninterrupted journey in the film was in fact two trips filmed over a six-month span.

Not only did Connection executive producer Roger James bravely present himself (against his lawyers’ wishes) at a festival semi-flogging, but the now-suspect film is itself is the subject of an internal itv inquiry, legal action, and two forthcoming documentaries.

Ethics aside, the aesthetic argument against dramatic re-enactments in documentaries was framed by one filmmaker who described them as ‘the worst possible type of tourism in the past.’

But God bless the gregarious people of Sheffield for holding on to their own truth. There was nary a Full Monty Muffins or Going All The Way Minicab Co. to be seen anywhere in town.

gerry flahive is a documentary producer at the nfb in Toronto. His recent productions include The Man Who Might Have Been and Mountie: Canada’s Mightiest Myth.